


Alas, alas! That ever love was sin!

by cumaeansibyl



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: (you know how this works you'll have to wait til the end), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dissociation, Featuring: Actual Plot, First Time, Getting Together, M/M, Nephilim, Non-Explicit Sex, Post-Apocalypse Fallout, Post-Canon, Scene: Flood in Mesopotamia 3004 BC (Good Omens), Sergeant Shadwell Is Not Appearing In This Fic, Sexual Repression, Shame, The Watchers (Abrahamic Religions), Trans Newton Pulsifer, office politics, or a retelling if you like, tags to be added as i remember them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-18 03:29:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28985637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cumaeansibyl/pseuds/cumaeansibyl
Summary: Aziraphale and Crowley have done a lot of things for their respective employers that, by mutual understanding, they've kept to themselves. When representatives of Heaven and Hell turn up to ask about the days before the Flood, however, it's time to confess the parts they played in Heaven's greatest atrocity.Could Heaven and Hell be planning for the next war? Is atonement possible for a sin five thousand years old? And whatisthe strange obstacle that's still keeping Aziraphale and Crowley apart?Updates daily! It's all finished, just have to post it.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 289
Kudos: 86





	1. follow me into the desert, as thirsty as you are

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from "The Canterbury Tales," by Geoffrey Chaucer, specifically The Wife of Bath's [prologue](https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/wife-baths-prologue-and-tale-0), in which the Wife defends her right to seek sexual pleasure as she sees fit, from anyone who pleases her.
> 
> I started this story in July of 2019, having not written any fiction to speak of in ten years. I kept getting overwhelmed and putting it down, but it kept bringing me back.
> 
> I am so incredibly grateful to my talented, hilarious, brilliant betas, [laurashapiro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurashapiro) and [juliet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliet), the crack team of elite specialists who helped me make this little fic the very best it can be. I promise I will stop complaining about exposition.
> 
> And thanks, as always, to my dearest demon [voidbat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidbat), without whom I wouldn't be in this fandom in the first place, and what the hell I would've done with myself for the last year and a half I have _no_ idea.

When Hell came to Aziraphale’s doorstep, it arrived under a white flag.

“You can’t seriously think that’s going to convince me,” the angel Aziraphale said, looking up at the dingy sheet of printer paper stapled to a meter stick.

“Whatever precautions you want, I get it,” said Dagon, Lord of the Files, hefting a damp accordion folder under her arm as the bottom seam threatened to give way. “But we need to talk.”

“Shall I get the hose?” Crowley inquired over the angel’s shoulder, all innocence. 

“Look.” Dagon pinched the bridge of her nose with inky fingers. “We all got excited about getting another go at Heaven, me included, but it was — stupid. I ran the numbers myself, I knew it wouldn’t work. But you can’t just _tell_ anyone that.”

Crowley and Aziraphale exchanged a glance. “She’s not wrong,” Aziraphale said. 

“And yet she did try to kill me,” Crowley said.

“Yes, and I regret it, because now you probably won’t do what I want, but if I don’t ask you _definitely_ won’t do what I want.” The flag made frustrated little arcs above her head. “So what do I do? Just… fuck off?”

“That seems appropriate,” Aziraphale said. Crowley turned away to hide his glee.

“Don’t get smug.” She shook the folder at them, and Aziraphale coughed politely as mould wafted up from its sagging mouth. “Seem to recall old Crawly wasn’t the only one concerned in this business.”

“It’s _Crowley_ ,” Aziraphale said, because Crowley had long since given up.

“Not back then it wasn’t,” Dagon said. “You know, a thought just occurred to me. How come you didn’t get locked up with all the others?”

“What?” Aziraphale said.

“Don’t play coy with me, angel.” Crowley hissed a little at the nickname, but Dagon only showed her equally sharp teeth in return. “Did Crawly really never slither up your tunic? Or was it only dallying with _humans_ that put an angel on the naughty list?”

Crowley, for the first time in several centuries, stood up completely straight. His face went white, with two bright red splotches — humiliation or anger, Aziraphale thought, if not both — high on either cheekbone.

“No,” Aziraphale said. No to her first question: the image of Crowley _slithering_ anywhere made him feel hot and confused, but that discomfiture was blotted out by the horror of Dagon’s next words. How long had it been since he’d thought of those strange, dreamlike days after Eden, when the children of God had looked upon the children of men and seen that they were fair? And had he really thought he could go on like that forever, ignoring his sins as if they would never come back on him? _No_ , he thought, _I must have known, but I can’t, I won’t, not now —_

“Yes,” Dagon said. “Are you going to let me in, or are we all going to stand here like arseholes?”

Wordlessly, Aziraphale stood aside to let Dagon pass. The flag slapped against the doorframe, and he snatched it away. He and Crowley had shared a measure of peace for the first time, but he’d been a fool to think one side or the other wouldn’t come to take it away. A small, selfish part of him was grateful that at least it wasn’t Heaven.

“What do you want with the Watchers now?” Crowley said, watching them both intently. He looked _ill_ , if it wasn’t silly to say that of a demon who’d never had so much as a cold, and Aziraphale wondered what he thought, now, of the part he’d played — and how much he knew of Aziraphale’s own. “I seem to recall Hell made out pretty well from it, in the end.”

“Look, I _personally_ could care less what anybody does with any of… that.” Dagon made an improbable thrusting motion with her hand. “I’m only talking to you about this because the accounting’s all mucked up. The Watchers aren’t properly part of either side, we had to create a whole new designation in the system, and now Heaven is trying to reappropriate them but they were earmarked for Hell and I won’t stand for it.”

“Reappropriate?” Aziraphale said. “As in… restore them?”

“Like I said, it’s complicated. Technically they’re still angels, just suspended, so it’d be a simple status change. But their reassignment to the Pit was still permanent, just deferred.”

“Until Armageddon,” Aziraphale said, remembering all at once. “The Watchers were supposed to be cast down in the Final Judgment along with -- well, all of you, not to put too fine a point on it.”

“Which didn’t happen, and _isn’t_ happening,” Crowley said, “as far as anyone can tell.”

“Right,” Dagon said, “and you can imagine how antsy people are getting. That was supposed to wind up _all_ the outstanding paperwork and now I don’t know when I’ll be able to get to any of it.”

Crowley cackled, but Aziraphale knew that laugh, and it wasn’t a happy one. “Oh, you poor _things_. All that time and effort immanentizing the eschaton[1], and all for nothing!”

“It’s not funny,” Dagon grumbled. “That’s a significant personnel resource, and right now it’s going to waste. I had them processing expiatory sacrifices, scapegoats and soforth, but we don’t get many these days, and they can’t handle raw sin. Whereas If Heaven gets them back they’ll have a definite advantage — you don’t want that, do you?”

“Don’t want you getting it either,” Crowley said. “Tried to kill me. Still haven’t forgotten. Anyway, why shouldn’t they go back? That’s where they belong, really.”

“Don’t let’s be too hasty,” Aziraphale said. Both demons turned to look at him, surprised and, in Dagon’s case, possibly impressed. “I’m not altogether certain that would be best for _them_. What if Heaven decides the easiest way to close the book is to simply…” He flicked his fingers, as if discarding something. 

“You really think they would?” Crowley asked. “When they could use them against Hell?”

“ _If_ they could. I honestly don’t know how well-disposed the poor things would be, after all this time. And when I think of what Heaven might demand of them as proof of loyalty…”

“Oh, dearie me, that wouldn’t do at all,” Dagon drawled, aiming to mimic Aziraphale and landing at Mr Humphries. It was a bad enough impression that Aziraphale didn’t realize he was being mocked, which rescued Dagon from active retribution on Crowley’s part. “Probably worse than what we’ve got planned.”

“Wait,” Crowley said, “I thought you just wanted to cast them into the pit.”

Dagon gaped like a carp. “Er, I mean, worse than that.”

“No, that’s not what you meant.” Crowley sidled up just behind Dagon’s shoulder and flickered his tongue with a little hiss, as if tasting her motives. She was a veteran of too many department meetings to back away, but her gills twitched. “You meant Hell was thinking about a loyalty test too.”

“Only if we can keep them out of the pit,” she protested. “I don’t even know if that’s possible, I haven’t found the actual suspension paperwork yet. If there’s anything in there we can sneak past Heaven —”

“Really, now,” Aziraphale said, “lawyer jokes aside, Heaven gives no quarter in contract law.”

“I’ve missed the petty office politics, I really have,” Crowley said, “but why are you asking _us_? Why don’t you just ask them?”

Dagon twiddled with the elastic holding her folder (mostly) together. “We thought — someone they knew might — it’s a very delicate proposition, you understand, and —”

“You _can’t_ ,” Aziraphale said, his eyes beginning to gleam. “You can’t actually get at them, can you?”

“... no.”

“Oh, splendid.” Both demons looked confused. “You see, Heaven didn’t allow the Watchers to _Fall_ , per se, because it would have meant giving Hell a significant numerical advantage. That also meant we couldn’t have just anyone sneaking up and chivvying the door open, now could we? So when — when they were —” He stopped, suddenly horrified at his brisk self-congratulatory tone. Because the next words — _cast out, imprisoned, condemned_ — would be a blasphemy in that voice, and yet the cheery corporate euphemisms of Heaven were ash in his mouth.

“You were saying,” Crowley prodded, looking even more confused — no, concerned, and how long had Aziraphale been standing there gawping like a fool? When was the last time Crowley, or anyone, had seen him truly at a loss for words? What on earth must they think of him? _Say something, come on, it’s getting worse, say something!_

“Er. Yes, well, the — enclosure was created to keep anyone, angel or demon, from opening it so long as Hell remained an independent domain. Presumably Michael was going to take care of all the, ah, casting into pits of fire. That really is her area.” He didn’t mention the times he’d seen her practicing; he’d always found that rather morbid, especially when she had Sandalphon in to critique her form.

“She must be devastated,” Dagon said. “No angels or demons, you said. Is that a loophole? Could a human do it?”

“It isn’t accessible from this plane. They’d have to come in from Hell, which no living human could do, and we all know how useless the dead ones are.”

“Drat.” Crowley was still looking at him strangely, but then he seemed to arrive at a decision all at once, with a smack of his lips. “Welp, it’s something to think about,” he told Dagon, sliding behind her again and herding her, rather unsubtly, toward the door. “We’ll see if anything comes to mind, eh? And meantime, why don’t we just keep this between the three of us, no sense bringing in additional claimants.”

“I can tell you’re trying to get rid of me, you know,” Dagon said.

“Oh, we’ve been trying to get rid of you since you showed up, this is just the first shot we had at making it stick.” Crowley snapped his fingers, and the door swung open with a jingle. “ _If_ you please.”

“I hate trying to stay on your good side,” she said, but she left. 

Aziraphale looked down at the sad little flag he still held. “Well. That was a thing.”

“Quite a thing,” Crowley agreed. “Listen, um, if it’s none of my business feel free to tell me where to stick it, but — what is it you weren’t telling her?”

Aziraphale’s stomach twisted. “I wasn’t aware of any omissions,” he said, but his voice hitched and he wished he hadn’t. He wished he knew whether he was more sorrowful at lying to Crowley or upset at being caught in it.

“Mm-hmm. Aziraphale, you can just say you don’t want to tell me. Don’t know what use it is keeping Heaven’s secrets from _me_ , but it’s not like I need them anyway.” Crowley turned away with a little kick in the air and began an elaborately indifferent swagger toward the philology section.

“Oh, my dear,” Aziraphale said helplessly. “You’re welcome to anything I know of Heaven’s secrets, which isn’t much, but this — it’s —”

“No, no, I understand,” Crowley said, but he _didn’t_ understand, and Aziraphale didn’t know how to tell him. He clenched his fists so hard they shook a little, then forced himself to relax.

“Once I asked you if you had any regrets,” he said, and Crowley stopped. “It was a long time ago, in Byzantium. Do you remember it?”

“I don’t forget much,” Crowley said. He didn’t turn around.

“You told me, ah, where I could stick it, which I quite deserved, and I’m not going to ask you again now. But… do you know _why_ I asked?”

Crowley shrugged. “At the time I thought you were, y’know, trying to keep me in my place.”

“I won’t deny that I did that, oh, all too often.” Aziraphale worried his lower lip with his teeth. “But this time, that wasn’t what I meant at all. I only… I just… I didn’t know how to admit it, you see, for fear that I was the only one. I thought perhaps it would be easier to talk about if I could get you to start.”

“That far back, angel?” Crowley finally looked at him, but he could hardly stand that mingled pity and surprise. He wanted to be furious with him for that — did he think Aziraphale was too stupid to know better, or too cruel to care, or both? — but that suddenly seemed like too much effort.

“That far, and much farther. You were the only person I could ever have told, but I was afraid to, because it would have meant telling you _what_ I regretted. And then you would know. And then I would have to see that, in your face, every time you talked to me… if you ever did talk to me again.”

“Aziraphale, how. How did you get yourself this twisted up about telling _a demon from Hell_ about the bad things you’d done? Did you think I would be shocked at anything Heaven came up with?”

Aziraphale shook his head, again at a loss for words. He really was quite tired, for some reason, and it was more difficult to think in sentences when one was tired. Crowley was looking at him in that aggravating way again, _examining_ him, and he wanted it to stop but he wasn’t sure he knew how to explain what, precisely, in Crowley’s manner he found upsetting.

At last he sighed. “I think now is not a good time to talk about it. Receiving the Lord of the Files was a rather unpleasant shock, and I… well, it’s kept until now, hasn’t it?” Secretly he was hoping that Crowley would lose interest and Dagon wouldn’t come back and the whole thing would be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction without his further involvement.

“All right, angel,” Crowley said, and in the wry corners of his mouth Aziraphale could see he knew exactly what the angel hoped to gain by delay, but was, with infinite courtesy, omitting to mention it. Aziraphale sighed again. He was going to owe Crowley for this, in some disproportionately vexatious way, and when he least expected it too.

### Footnotes

1. Crowley only ever agreed with William F. Buckley on two things. This was the other one.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: [Soundgarden, "Burden In My Hand"](https://youtu.be/XmIqIVxUuKs)


	2. messed up in a god-shaped hole

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The other side checks in with some policy updates. Crowley has an excellent idea that won't backfire at all.

With the kind of shopkeeper’s instinct only possible to one who has kept the same shop for two hundred years, Aziraphale once or twice a month remained open past dinner. Claims that A.Z. Fell avoided selling any books at all were pernicious slander, as his records clearly demonstrated. After all, he couldn’t buy _new_ books unless he rotated out the old, short of some really egregious spatial chicanery, and acquisition was half the joy of his profession. That he detested a dilettante, looked askance at the careless, and once nearly smote an interior designer seeking to buy “decorative” books by the meter, were all much fairer allegations.

As he had predicted, based on nothing he could have explained, custom remained steady through the dinner hour. Crowley had long since finished his doner kebab and was idly picking up chip crumbs with a moistened fingertip, bored but with no particular need to fix it. At some point he would probably decide it was Aziraphale’s job to fix it, but Aziraphale was rather grateful that that was the only sort of job anyone expected of him anymore.

He blotted the last entry in his book and leaned back, satisfied. About ten minutes since the last customer had left, and he thought that might be all for the day. Perhaps Crowley would ask if there was anything decent to drink. 

The front door closed, which was odd, because he hadn’t heard it open, or the tinkle of the bell. “Excuse me,” he said, leaving his desk, “I just want to let you know we’ll be closing in five — _Crowley, run!_ ” 

Something crashed to the floor in the back room. Aziraphale spread his wings to shield the back half of the shop, hoping desperately he could give Crowley time. His sword hand clenched at the air, helpless.

Uriel rolled her eyes. “Is this necessary,” she said, too irritated for inflection.

“I am getting very tired of this,” Crowley said, peering through the gap between Aziraphale’s head and his left wing. “I thought we’d all decided to be cool, but no, apparently we’ve got to take out a _restraining order_ —”

“You’re not _running_ ,” Aziraphale hissed.

“He doesn’t have to,” Uriel said. “If you could just stop being dramatic for one minute — and you wonder why we always found you so difficult to work with.”

“Steady on, angel,” Crowley murmured, for his ears only. “She’s not here for a fight.” His hand patted Aziraphale’s back just between the wings.

Aziraphale shuddered at the touch, a strange and painful heat radiating from the point of contact. Crowley’s hand went still for a moment, and then it was gone. At once relieved and disappointed, Aziraphale put his wings away. “I’m not the one who threw my colleague against a wall,” he noted. “But if we begin enumerating workplace hostilities, I suppose we’ll be here all day. What do _you_ want?”

Uriel tilted her head. “What do _I_ want?” she said, repeating Aziraphale’s unintentional emphasis. “I’m not the first one here looking for something, am I?”

Aziraphale wished that they’d sent Sandalphon instead. A grinning bully he could handle, but Uriel had always been one of the smartest in upper management, if still hobbled by convention.

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” He felt all over bristles, still standing with his feet apart and legs tensed, ready to fight or run. Crowley almost put a hand on his arm, then looked embarrassed — no, concerned — and pulled it away. Understandable, that he’d worry about doing it in front of an archangel, but Aziraphale rather wished he’d done it anyway.

“Normally, it isn’t. But certain negotiations are underway between ourselves and the opposition, the results of which may be of some interest to you. I assume you’ve been briefed?”

“To an extent, and only on one side of the question, as you’d expect.”

“The idea,” said Uriel, “and you’ll understand that this is confidential —”

“Really, who would we tell?” Aziraphale said with some asperity.

“— quite right. The _tentative_ idea is for Heaven and Hell to agree that the Battle of Armageddon _did_ happen, and it was a draw.”

“But it literally didn’t,” said Crowley. “I’ve used some pretty weak rationales in my time, but this is actually just a lie.”

“A negotiated settlement between Gabriel and Beelzebub. They did speak, at the airfield.”

“Before they _gave up_ and went crying to Adam’s daddy.” Crowley slouched toward the back of the shop, as if bored with the conversation, but Aziraphale could feel how keenly his eyes watched them.

“It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Uriel said carefully. “But if an Archangel and a Prince of Hell both say they reached an agreement, and their stories match, who can contradict them?”

“That’s not how this _works_ ,” Aziraphale protested. “There is still such a thing as objective truth!”

“Not since I invented postmodernism,” Crowley said glumly at his elbow before slouching off on another circuit.

“Oh, you did not.”

“Objective truth lies within the mind of God,” Uriel continued. “If the war was truly Her plan, then She will allow us to continue as though it had happened. And we _think_ that will allow us to release the Watchers, but since you were involved in the process, we’d appreciate your input.”

“I adore this concept,” Crowley said. “As long as God doesn’t personally intervene to stop us, we’re not doing anything wrong! Not that anyone’s actually heard from Her in person since Paulie Two-Tents[2], but who’s counting.”

Uriel smiled for the first time since she’d appeared, and it was almost gentle. “Are you really offended that she won’t talk to you? She doesn’t even talk to us.”

“Doesn’t she _really_ ,” Aziraphale said. His voice was very calm, the calm of rigid self-control. 

“I fucking knew it,” Crowley yelled somewhere behind him. He barely heard it. All his attention was leveled at Uriel, who, for possibly the first time in her life, was firmly on the back foot. 

“Well — in a manner of —”

“I had been under the impression that to speak to the Metatron was to speak to God,” Aziraphale said, and his voice was so dangerously soft that Crowley, hearing it, quite literally appeared at his side from across the shop.

“It is,” Uriel said. “Everything said to the Metatron is communicated directly to the Almighty. It’s just that She doesn’t always provide a direct answer, and it’s been understood that we are to instance self-directed functionality vis-a-vis elucidation and implementation of policy directives —”

“Really, _must_ you,” Aziraphale said, ordinary irritation displacing, for a moment, the horrible thing building inside him. Crowley made a wordless noise of frustration, flung his hands up, and stomped off for another circle.

Uriel looked even more discomfited for a moment. Suddenly she threw her head up and stared Aziraphale in the face, and he realized she hadn’t looked him in the eye once this entire time. “When you talk to the Metatron, you _do_ talk to God. And then She doesn’t answer, but we know everything we need to know already, so we answer for Her because _that’s how it works now_.”

“You presume to know the mind of God,” Aziraphale said, and his voice echoed in the space the way sounds usually didn’t.

“Yikes, right?” Crowley said over Uriel’s shoulder, showing his teeth as he had with Dagon. She stepped back smartly — Heaven’s office politics were no less vicious, in their own way, but didn’t usually involve overt threat displays. “Dial back the wrath a bit, Aziraphale, that’s not a fight you’re gonna win.”

“We presume _nothing_ ,” Uriel said, and the shop went dark in the light of her glory, her face a thousand-pointed star ablaze across dimensions. Crowley yelped and dove for cover. “How _dare_ you speak to me thus, outcast and defiled?”

For just a moment, Aziraphale was ready to answer her in full truth and justice: he could feel the darkness around him clustered with eyes, waiting to lift their lids on the world. But Crowley’s cry of pain still rang in his ears; Aziraphale at his maddest might be willing to fight Uriel and lose, but Crowley, caught between them, would never survive.

So Aziraphale pulled back, closed down, shrank into his body. “My apologies,” he whispered, hating how naturally his posture fell into appeasement. “I forgot myself.”

He was sure it wouldn’t be enough, not after all he’d already done to enrage her and all of Heaven besides, but Uriel relaxed into smugness. “See that it doesn’t happen again,” she said, sounding oddly aloof, as if the whole episode was too inconsequential to take notice of. “We’ll touch base if we have any additional questions.”

And then she was gone, and the lights went back to normal, and Aziraphale sat down hard on a footstool that had kindly decided to keep him off the floor.

“They’ve lied to me all this time,” he whispered. “Not just when I tried… Crowley, _this whole time_.” 

“Figures,” Crowley said, sidling out of his hiding place. “They wouldn’t be so pleased with themselves if they weren’t the ones calling the shots.”

“It’s strange, though,” Aziraphale said. “They were never that forthcoming with me when I still worked for them. Why would she tell me something so — so _damning_ — now that I’m not one of theirs anymore?”

“Funny,” said Crowley, as if to himself, “what people will say when… motivated.”

Aziraphale had been looking staunchly at his feet, but now he looked up, startled. “Crowley, what did you do?”

“She’s proud of it,” Crowley said softly. Strange shadows crowned his head like the afterimage of an eclipse, and his eyes blazed a sick, sulfurous yellow, the pupils swallowed in flame. “Proud, and ashamed. With that kind of opening I can tempt anyone into _anything_.”

“Good God,” Aziraphale breathed. For all they’d talked about temptations over the years, he’d rarely seen Crowley in action; he would cheerfully inconvenience humans to hear Aziraphale scold him, but rarely tempt them into things, even when it might have served his purposes better. In a rare moment of seriousness, Crowley had once said that he didn’t give humans free will just to take it away again, but Aziraphale had objected to the blasphemy. Really, for an ageless being he’d been so _young_ back then, thinking every little thing was blasphemous. How many times had Crowley drawn yet another veil over his true thoughts just to keep from frightening Aziraphale away?

Well, he wasn’t in much condition to hide anything at the moment. The demon rolled his head back and sighed in pleasure, a luxurious, sated sound: drunk on the sins of an archangel.

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said again, struggling not to recoil. “My dear, I really think you ought to —”

“Ought to what?” the demon said dreamily. He flowed toward Aziraphale, draping his arms over the angel’s shoulders, all boneless and clinging.

“Well, er — sober up. Metaphorically. Or perhaps metaphysically.” His throat felt swollen, as if he’d swallowed something that wouldn’t go down, and his stomach cramped strangely.

“Feels nice, angel,” Crowley purred in his ear, making all the muscles in his neck tighten painfully. “Would you like to try some? Generosity is a virtue, but I’ll still share with you. I’d share a _lot_ of things with you.”

“ _Stop it!”_ He threw Crowley off, shaking all over, shocks of pain radiating through his chest. He didn’t understand — Crowley wasn’t threatening him, there was nothing to be afraid of, why did this always happen when the demon came too close?

“Angel?” Crowley said softly. Then, in a much clearer voice: “oh my god what the fuck was I just saying.”

“Nothing of consequence, my dear.” Aziraphale tried to sound reassuring, but as much as pretending everything was fine came naturally to him, he couldn’t hope to convince the person who knew him best. “I think you were just a bit — squiffy.” Oh, why did he always choose the stupidest words he knew when he most needed to stand on his dignity?

“Oh, is _that_ all,” Crowley said. “I don’t suppose you know what the fuck I was thinking, messing her about, because I sure don’t. She could’ve punted me through a wall.”

“I very much doubt it would have come to that, my dear,” Aziraphale said, glad for the change of subject. “Still, I don’t think you ought to do that again. It might be habit-forming.”

Crowley snorted, as if trying to clear his sinuses. “I wasn’t expecting it to be that high-proof. How’s it possible for an angel to sin like _that_?”

Aziraphale considered. Oh, certainly he fell short of the glory of God in his own ways, but Crowley’s altered state spoke of something far more potent and dangerous than his own little indulgences.

“It’s a blasphemy,” he said at last. “First to claim that God must condone any action She does not prevent, and then to relish that power, to take pride in it — it would be self-serving in a human, but in one who _knows_ the face of God it’s a hideous, wicked thing.” He stopped suddenly when Crowley stepped back, realizing that he’d raised his voice. “At least, that’s my theory.”

“It’s treason, is what it is,” Crowley said, with not a little bitterness. “You know I’m not carrying water for Lucifer, but how’d _he_ get kicked out and these shitheads got put in charge? I tell you what, I don’t even know who to be angry at anymore.”

Aziraphale leaned his forehead against the cool wood of a shelf support and closed his eyes. “I think I know who you should start with,” he said quietly.

### Footnotes

2. Aziraphale had never quite given up on getting Crowley to treat the Apostles with a modicum of respect, but with Paul of Tarsus he had never bothered.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: Nick Cave, "[There Is A Light](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D17Tih8B-z0)"


	3. there’s no map and a compass wouldn’t help at all

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Watchers start asking questions about their relationship to humanity. Crawly has some advice.

It was three o’clock. Humans had been on earth for about five hundred years, and an angel and a demon had been sitting together by the well for about four days of that. Rather, the demon lay sprawled over a low ridge of rock on his belly, his face pushed into the sand, and the angel sat bolt upright, with one large hand planted solidly on the demon’s back. 

“Don’t suppose I can get up now,” the demon said into the ground. “S’been _days_ , come on.”

“I have detained you and prevented you from achieving your objectives,” said the angel, “and I shall insulate our client base from your undesirable influence.”

“Be easier to do that if I left. Which I am fully prepared to do.” The demon kicked his feet up and waved them aimlessly. “Believe me, you’ve made your point.”

“I can perform my core functions more efficiently through direct interfacing.”

“Did you just invent jargon?” The demon craned his neck at an angle that a human neck would have found prohibitive. “Look, someone’s coming. You want your, um, clients knowing I’m around?”

“Absolutely not.” The angel’s previous serenity dropped off him all at once, and he pulled the demon up by a fistful of his red hair. “Get — you need to be somewhere else. Don’t let me see you here again.”

“Oh, I know where I’m not welcome.” The demon staggered back as the angel released him with a push, nearly tipped backward into the well, overcorrected forward, and abruptly, out of sheer irritation, turned into a snake. Slithering up the trunk of the nearest palm tree, he watched as the angel shook out his robes and stood to await the approaching figure.

“Remain silent,” the angel said. “I am still Watching you.”

“Of course,” the serpent said. “I’d expect nothing lessss.”

“Hello,” the figure called, waving the arm that wasn’t holding the water jug balanced on one shoulder.

The angel took a deep breath and smiled wide. “Good afternoon! I am Semyaza the Watcher and I’m happy to assist. How can I help you walk in God’s light today?”

The figure — a female human, of average height for an adult but barely coming up to the angel’s elbow — blinked at him. “Um, hi. I’m Naomi.” She unslung her water jug and sat down, stretching her legs out before her with a little sigh. Her eyes cut back up at Semyaza and he felt uncomfortably warm. “Do you always ask such personal questions?”

The angel hesitated. He was department chair, he’d worked out all the customer service scripts as head of a cross-disciplinary committee comprising representatives from all nine Choirs of Heaven and the seventeen districts of Earth, and this one small-ish human had already outrun all of Heaven’s ideas on what a human being might say. Semyaza realized, belatedly, that they’d established a dozen workflows and no operational goals, and now this woman — not _the customer_ in the aggregate but one discrete and unnervingly self-possessed human individual — was smiling at him as though she knew just how badly he was in need of process improvement.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last. “If I overstepped.”

“Well, hardly!” she said. Her frown looked affronted, but her eyes were laughing; he hadn’t known they could do two things with only one face. “It’s what you came here for, isn’t it? Only — it’s maybe a little weird, having someone just come out of nowhere like that, when we don’t even know you. And shouldn’t we know each other? We’re all in it together.” 

Semyaza watched as she spread and wiggled her toes, easing the tension from a long day on her feet. He found himself considering how the bones of the foot and ankle came together — a strong column, but delicate too, sharp under the brown skin. Fearfully and wonderfully made, he thought, and so _fragile_.

_You’re staring_ , he told himself. “I — yes, I suppose we are. Together. Only we, that is, my colleagues and I, we weren’t sure if — it might be. If _we_ might be. Unwelcome.”

“I should hope we have better manners than that!” Naomi said, laughing with all her face now. “Look, if you or any of the others ever want to, I don’t know, meet some of us? I’d invite you to dinner, but I suspect you don’t really, I mean, you probably don’t need dinner.”

“Not as such,” he said, “but we — _I_ would be honoured.”

The serpent, forgotten, slithered back out of his tree and went sidewinding off across the sand.

* * *

It made an impressive show, from where Aviram and Tamar sat: a line of tall, white figures, heads touched with light, filing down between the hills toward the river. The Watchers were a distant fact in their lives; you might meet one on the way to the distant grove where you had to go for good lumber, or out hunting the antelope that only came in the desert, but only one at a time and never for more than a few awkward questions. Being watched by Heaven’s operatives was, in big-picture terms, the most significant factor in their lives, but it’s always been surprisingly easy to forget the big picture in favor of more immediate questions.

Their daughter saw them both staring in the same direction and came out of the house, still holding her spoon. “Oh, Lord. I didn’t think he _meant_ it.”

“Meant what?” Aviram asked.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you, I met one of them at the well and it was weird, you know how they are, but then he was like ‘sorry that was weird,’ and I was like ‘no it’s cool but it would be nice if we actually knew who you were’ and I — kind of invited him to visit? But you know how it is, you just say ‘sometime,’ I didn’t expect it _now_!”

“I don’t see why not now,” Tamar said. “It’s not like we’re _not_ already having a party.”

“But — do they even eat? _What_ do they eat? What are we even going to talk about?”

Aviram watched as the angels crossed the river, walking on water. “They’ve never known much about how we live our lives,” he said, the bitterness in his voice softened by long endurance. “Perhaps they’ve decided it’s time to learn.”

Semyaza headed the procession, bearing in his arms a basket of a curious weave Naomi hadn’t seen before, filled with apricots. “Good evening, Naomi,” he said. His resonant voice was pitched too loudly for the space; Naomi flushed, and several people startled, but he didn’t seem to notice. “We have brought — offerings?”

“Odd folk, but they’ve learned manners from somewhere,” Aviram murmured.

Naomi flushed even worse and hissed “Daaaad!”

“Yes! Offerings!” chimed in the Watcher with a crown of black braided hair just behind him. She also carried a basket, full of cypress cones. “Please accept these complimentary food items as an overture toward mutual understanding and collaboration!”

Tamar blinked, as perplexed by the Watchers’ idiom as humans usually were, then shook herself together like the small brown bird she resembled and stepped forward. “On behalf of the people of Bayit, I welcome you as our guests” — she put a slight emphasis on the word — “to the harvest festival. We’re delighted to have you.” No one else seemed particularly delighted, but Tamar looked determined that they would be. Only Naomi and her father noticed the tension in her proud posture, and the way her eyes flicked toward them for support.

Everyone stood around trying not to make eye contact for an uncomfortable moment, and then Aviram held out his hands for Semyaza’s basket. “Let me take that for you, son,” he said. “Fine apricots you’ve brought us. Find them in the eastern groves, did you?”

“I have also brought food!” the second Watcher chimed in, lifting her basket of cypress cones. “It was in the hills to the west.”

“That’s not food, Azazel,” came a voice from the end of the line.

“You don’t know that.”

“I do so, and I _told_ you so, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Be quiet, Batarel! Just because your competency is plants, you think you know everything.”

“At least I know not everything that grows on a tree is food!”

Naomi intervened here, as people were starting to gather for the spectacle of angels arguing. “We appreciate the thought, we really do,” she said, “but I’m afraid she’s right. We, um, we can’t really eat those.”

“Oh.” The angel looked crestfallen. “Oh, I _am_ sorry. Here I am trying to establish cordial relations with our client base, and I go and make a beginner mistake like that.”

“Nobody’s perfect,” said Radah, the town gossip, clearly charmed by the realization that even Heaven’s agents could be wrong. Suddenly something in the air seemed to pop and everyone was laughing, even Azazel, who tossed the basket to one side and clapped her hands.

“New strategy!” she said. “Show us what you _can_ eat.”

From there it got easier. Aviram and several other villagers took it upon themselves to instruct Batarel and Semyaza on what each held to be the only correct way to prepare apricots — thoroughly confusing even themselves in the end, while their children made a game of snatching the fruit to eat plain. Azazel found herself surrounded by admiring girls, explaining how she’d done her thick black hair into its rows of braids. Arakiel did ask a few people to rate their willingness to recommend God to their friends on a scale of one to ten, but they were so confused that he soon gave up and joined a discussion on gardening.

* * *

By the time Crawly arrived, the lanterns had been lit and the band had just finished its first set. One stout angel was deep in discussion with the lute player about acoustics, and another who might have been his twin was blissfully tap-tapping on the biggest drum, encouraged by the drummer, who kept setting him more complex rhythms on his smaller drum to imitate. 

Without attracting notice, Crawly got himself a drink and slipped deeper into the enclosure, finding an underlit stretch of wall to hunker against. He hadn’t forgotten Semyaza’s threats, but he couldn’t tolerate a full-scale angelic incursion like this without at least _trying_ to find out what they were up to.

When he finally spotted Semyaza, though, he realized he was quite safe, for the moment. Naomi was sitting next to him — _right_ next to him, her head resting on his bicep and her ankle hooked companionably under his, and he looked both thrilled and extremely confused. It wasn’t that she intended anything by it, Crawly knew; all over the party he could see people with their arms linked, sitting in each other’s laps, dropping a light kiss to cheek or forehead as they passed each other. It was just the way these people had with touch, nothing more than a casual expression of amity. Semyaza’s face said he knew that, but he was still feeling something else, unfamiliar and unsettling but for all that strangely pleasant.

“Oh,” Crawly murmured. “Oh, now _that’s_ interesting.”

The band started up again, and Crawly sat up as straight as his spine allowed when he saw that a human had one of the Watchers by the hand, leading them to the space cleared for dancing. He hadn’t thought of angels as dancers, really — no reason they shouldn’t, but why would they? What he remembered of heaven involved a lot of singing, and a lot of aerial maneuvers that might qualify as dancing if you had six wings and no feet, but not much in the way of rhythm. Humans had invented that before almost anything else, turning the movement of their blood into sound; dancing had followed about a minute and a half afterward, sound back to movement. You couldn’t really have music, Crawly thought, without a body and without time, neither of which were part of the celestial experience.

But here these celestial beings were, fully embodied and trundling merrily forward through linear spacetime, and bless him if there wasn’t a chain of humans and angels now. Round and round in circles they went, holy and mortal feet treading the same earth, with much laughter and a good bit of stumbling. And if some of the angels were, maybe, just a bit eager to join hands with the humans — what harm could it do?

Well, plenty, but Crawly wasn’t going to push it. Yet. He could afford to sit back for a while and watch the angels dance.

* * *

In the end, he didn’t have to wait long.

They picked the hottest hour of the day, when the humans dozed indoors, only Crawly remaining to luxuriate in the punishing heat. He wasn’t best pleased by the shadow the angels cast, but he’d been waiting for them to come to him, and he wasn’t going to turn them away.

“Crawly, excuse us,” Azazel said. “We were wondering if we could ask you a personal question.”

“We’ll certainly understand if you prefer not to answer,” Semyaza said.

“Well,” said Crawly, stretching himself out in a way he knew others found deeply disconcerting, "give it a go and let's see."

They looked at each other. It turned into a staring contest, and Crawly basked in the growing frustration. Finally, Azazel made an aggravated noise and broke first, turning her sharp gaze on Crawly.

"Why did you Fall?"

"Ooh, that _is_ a personal one.” Crawly batted his eyelashes. “Why are you asking me, anyway? Isn't there a party line on it?"

“No one really talks about it now,” Azazel said.

"That’s right, you weren’t there," Crawly mused. "She created you after the Garden, once She needed more personnel down here. So of course they wouldn't have told you anything useful — they never do."

"They said Lucifer defied God," Semyaza said.

“Ah, but they didn't say over what _,_ did they?" Crawly said. "That's the tricky bit. And asking questions? Very dangerous territory.”

“Why wouldn’t they want us to know?” Semyaza asked. “I’m sure if we _had_ asked, someone would have told us.”

Azazel looked unconvinced. “I did ask, once,” she said. “They told me I shouldn’t ask.”

“See, I told you.” Crawly shook his head. “They’ll tell you anything except the stuff you really need to know.”

“Right! Surely we ought to know what _not_ to do,” Semyaza said. “So it can’t do us any harm to know what Lucifer did.”

“That doesn’t mean we’ll know if we _can_ do what we — um — I mean, anything we might want to do.”

Crawly suppressed a smile. It almost wasn’t fair. “Well, it’s probably for the best if I don’t tell you. Sounds like it’s above your pay grade anyway.”

They both bristled — yep, too easy. “I think we can handle it,” Semyaza said, at the same time as Azazel said “We’re not _children_.”

“As long as you don’t rat me out.” Crawly looked from side to side, then leaned closer. “A demon could get in a lot of trouble for disclosing secrets to the opposition.”

“We won’t,” they said together, leaning in to match him — eager to hear forbidden knowledge, anxious to hide what they were doing. Crawly felt a tingle all through his shoulders and down his spine. The hook was baited: now to set it.

“It was about the humans,” he began, not missing the angels’ apprehensive glance at each other. “The Almighty gave them dominion over the Earth, and that was already… there were some who thought the Earth was theirs by right. Not me, I wasn’t interested, but then She said that we should love the humans more than ourselves — more even than we loved Her — and Lucifer couldn’t stand for that. He said they weren’t worth his time, or his love, and he wasn’t going to give up all the _important_ things he’d been doing just to help them. So…” Crawly made an open-ended hand gesture, as if to say _thus, everything else._

“And you agreed with him?” Azazel asked, narrow-eyed.

“Dunno if I agreed with anyone,” Crawly said. “I was still trying to figure it out, but see, I wasn’t supposed to _need_ to figure it out, I was supposed to know the answer right away. I just… had too many questions.”

_(If You love them, why test them? Are we being tested too? What good is a love that punishes failure?)_

“Eh, bygones,” Crawly finished, with another hand wave. “S’all right, I like it here. Much more interesting than I expected.”

“Thank you, Crawly,” Semyaza said. “You’ve given us a lot to think about.”

“Indeed,” said Azazel, actually clasping his shoulder in a friendly fashion as she got up. “My thanks as well.”

“ _Indeed_ ,” Crawly said softly to himself, watching them walk away, toward the settlement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: Björk, "[Human Behaviour](https://youtu.be/p0mRIhK9seg)"


	4. this is the birth day of life and of love and wings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back, Aziraphale! Let's catch you up on what you've missed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: difficult childbirth offscreen, with non-explicit references to how things can go wrong.

Aziraphale, trudging wearily in from the pasture where he’d landed, thought to himself — not for the first time — that beings accustomed to existence outside of linear time should not be put in charge of scheduling. The mandatory staff retreat for Gabriel’s division had lasted so long that he was certain he wouldn’t recognize any of the humans anymore, though he doubted they’d had time to invent anything that would get them into real trouble. Right now, all he wanted was the kind of long, slow, sun-drenched slide into incoherence you got by settling in for the afternoon with a very large quantity of very mild wine.

The outskirts were out considerably farther than they’d been before he’d left, which was to be expected, and the newer buildings had arched windows, which was rather nice, but otherwise everything seemed to be as he’d left it. Then he turned a corner and nearly went right back the way he’d come, because surely he’d entered the wrong village.

The market, once notable chiefly for demonstrating “beige” as a collective plural, had unfolded into a festival of colours. Red head scarves, green skirts, blue shawls. Gold and ochre paints glowing on dark skin that shone just as luminous in the sun. Bright stones and beaten metals at wrist and neck and ear. Displays of baskets and bowls and blankets in colours from deep to bright, sometimes several together, sometimes _patterned_ — now how’d they done that? More importantly, where there had once been a line of hungry people waiting to trade for meager rations, the food sellers now sat relaxed and proud behind a very abundance of goods, fruit and meat and bread enough for dozens to eat their fill.

The dusty brown tent Aziraphale had once frequented for drinks was now, although still dusty, a deep purplish red — just the shade of the wine they’d been serving last time he was by, thin and acidic as it all was, but easier on the stomach than other vintages. And there in front of it, his coppery hair no longer standing out as starkly as it once had, was a familiar demon — a sight doubly welcome, as he was filling his cup from a very plump wineskin.

“Oi! Aziraphale!” Crawly called, waving a skinny arm.

“Shush,” the angel shushed, hurrying over to prevent further use of his name. “It’s barely past noon, you can’t have been drinking long enough to forget — _you_ know.”

“You _have_ been gone a while,” Crawly said. “We’re good now, the brethren and me. Can’t you tell? They’re all over the place and they don’t give a toss I’m here.”

Aziraphale absently took the cup Crawly filled for him and looked around him with his other eyes. Sure enough, there were at least half a dozen angels in this one block. It was surprising that he hadn’t sensed such a concentration of celestial energy, but then it didn’t seem quite as… _assertive_ as usual. The Watchers had tended to be very conscious of their righteousness, but now that Aziraphale was paying attention, their presence seemed much calmer.

“Yeah, the vibe’s totally different now,” Crawly said, answering the question he hadn’t asked. “About time, too, felt like you couldn’t take a shit without being Watched.”

“Crawly, _really_ ,” Aziraphale said, but his lips twitched and he hurried to sip his wine — which was much better than what he’d been used to, the tart flavor refreshing instead of astringent. “Oh, that’s rather good.”

“They’re teaching them how to do it with grain, too. They say it’s refreshing after a long day of work, which would be why I never got into it.” The demon sucked his teeth, then grinned. Aziraphale blinked.

“You mean one of them — one of _us_ — a Watcher is teaching them these things?”

“Should think you’d be happy to see all these improvements.”

“Why, now that you mention it, people do seem more at ease. I suppose it comes of not worrying about starvation all the time, that seems awfully draining. It’s only that — well, I’m not certain it’s allowed.”

“Oh, now, you don’t think all these angels would be doing it if it was wrong, do you? One or two, maybe, but the whole host’s settled in. See over there?” Across the way, one of the Watchers Aziraphale didn’t know was explaining something to a semicircle of humans who leaned in to watch his hands move small stones into a pattern. “Astronomy. You should see him and the astrologers go at it, it’s hilarious. First interdisciplinary turf war in history, but it sure won’t be the last.”

“I see. And how do _you_ benefit?”

“Me? You think I had anything to do with this?”

“I think there’s a reason the others have decided to tolerate you. That certainly wasn’t the case when I left.”

“I may have lent assistance in a few matters of social diplomacy.” Crawly slid even lower in his chair, stretching his legs in a most uncouth fashion. “They wanted to get together on their own. I just helped smooth over the initial misunderstandings.”

“And to what purpose?”

“General encouragement of vice.” His smile showed no teeth, but he still looked like he might bite. “Like you said, trying not to die is draining. Doesn’t leave much energy for sinning. It’s _wanting_ things, not needing them, makes for the best bad ideas.” Crawly yawned and there were all the teeth, sharp as anything. “Plus you can actually get drunk now without the indigestion stopping you first. You should’ve been here when the little darlings invented the bar fight.”

The astronomy session was breaking up, humans drifting away in chattering twos and threes. One who sat closer to the edge of the circle came over shyly and looked up at the Watcher, who smiled down at him and slipped an arm about his shoulders. The human’s face looked dazed for a second, yet happy. _Oh dear,_ Aziraphale thought, _is it like that, too? I suppose if people spend enough time together it’s only to be expected, but it’ll take some patience on everyone’s part._

"It's really rather lovely," Aziraphale said aloud.

Crawly followed his gaze, and blinked. "Really?"

"No! I mean, I suppose that’s nice enough, but no. I meant the way they share the things they know. To teach the humans all about the Almighty's wonders, I think, must be a very great privilege."

"Then why don't you join in?" For a moment, Crowley looked like he’d bitten into a rotten fruit, but it was gone so fast Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure he’d seen it.

Aziraphale drooped. "I'd like to, I really would, but — I haven't anything really to share. We weren't all granted knowledge of precious metals or plants or the stars, unfortunately.” He looked up, timidly, as though in apology for thinking anything in the Almighty’s plan could be unfortunate. “I was created to guard. Not to know."

"They're writing it down, you know,” Crawly said, overly casual. “Animal skins and some kind of powdered stuff, stones, I’m not sure. Penemue’s teaching them a simplified script. You could, I dunno, study up? Maybe start a collection?"

A strange, sparkling feeling lit Aziraphale up all through, something entirely new, as though he’d just had a star field created inside him. "Of course! Someone ought to keep those writings safe! To — to _guard_ them." He crinkled his eyes up at Crawly, who smiled in return, a softer, simpler happiness than usual. “That’s really quite clever, my dear, thank you.”

“Pfaaah,” Crawly said, but when Aziraphale refilled his cup, he accepted it from his adversary’s hand.

* * *

Some time later, Crawly was attempting to explain the theoretical basis of human magic, based on half an argument he’d overheard while tempting a villager to envy an angel’s favor, which was going about as well as could be expected. Aziraphale was in exactly the state of mellow confusion he’d set out to achieve, one in which a better explanation still wouldn’t have made sense. It was not one in which he could easily handle surprises, however, so when the shouting started he dropped a full cup of wine all over himself.

“Crawly! _Crawly!”_ Semyaza yelled, his sandals kicking up dust as he sprinted across the square toward them.

“Oh, what’d I do now,” Crawly grumbled. “I’m not even _trying_ to cause trouble, is it my fault if it happens?”

“He was right here with me,” Aziraphale said to the breathless Watcher as he skidded to a halt. “I can vouch for, oh, at least the past three hours.”

“No,” Semyaza panted, “it’s not — it’s Naomi. Something’s wrong.”

Aziraphale blinked, trying to remember if he’d met Naomi. Crawly, sober in the time it took to stand, started rolling up his sleeves as he followed Semyaza toward the outer settlement. “Early, en’t she? How long has she been in labour?”

“Nearly a day,” Semyaza said. “We thought it was going to be all right, her mother had easy births and so did all her sisters —”

“All her sisters had human husbands. You should have told me the minute contractions started.” Crawly’s extravagant gait usually didn’t work well with loose sand, but he had decided that wasn’t going to be an issue today, and Aziraphale was hard pressed to catch up with the two. He couldn’t possibly be hearing what he thought he was hearing — they couldn’t mean that a human and an angel had made — was that even possible? 

“How could you think this was going to be _normal_?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Semyaza cried, pulling at his tunic. “This is a human body, it works like any other! What could I have expected?”

Crawly didn’t answer, because just at the moment the house came in sight, Naomi screamed. It was a gurgling, almost liquid sound, and Crawly was off running, at a sandwinder speed neither angel could match.

They caught up to her at the door; she had stopped for a moment to compose herself and something indefinable had changed about her, not tangible but spiritual. She hadn’t been a man before, and hadn’t precisely become a woman now, but Crawly had claimed kinship with those who in sorrow bring forth children. “Keep him out here,” she said to Aziraphale, “no matter what you hear. I don’t know what I’m going to find, but he doesn’t need to see it.”

Naomi screamed again, her voice half-drowned, and Crawly hurried into the house. “Well, we’re going right along with it, aren’t we?” Aziraphale heard her say, before the door shut behind her. Her voice sounded genuinely cheerful, and Semyaza relaxed a fraction; only Aziraphale knew her well enough to hear the catch in her throat when she first saw the birthing bed.

The sun crawled across the sky. Semyaza kept leaning against the wall, sliding down to sit against it, then getting to his feet and pacing in a tight circle in front of the door before doing it all again. Aziraphale was tempted to put him to sleep, or possibly to shake him until he explained what in all the names of the Almighty he’d been _thinking_ , but he might be needed at any moment. To greet his child, hopefully, or else — it was superstitious to think that putting possibilities into words had any effect on the outcome, Aziraphale knew this, but every time he tried to consider what might happen his mind flinched away.

At long last, one of Naomi’s sisters came out, grey with exhaustion but smiling. “It’s all right,” she said to Semyaza, who gripped her shoulders at once. “Mama and baby both doing well.”

“Can I?” Semyaza whispered, eyes enormous. Aziraphale patted his shoulder cautiously.

“Only if you’re _very_ quiet,” Crawly said, poking her head out the door. “If you wake this child I will send you back to Heaven myself.”

Semyaza stumbled over his own feet, haste and hesitation combining to rob him of his self-command, and Crawly sighed as she made way for him. Aziraphale padded up behind him and stopped in the doorway.

Naomi lay pale and weak in her bed, her hair a mess but her face and neck freshly washed, and clean linen laid over her body. Cradled in her arms was the largest infant Aziraphale had ever seen in his life. It was quite the size of a year-old child, and he thought with horror of how difficult human labor could be with an ordinary newborn — how could Naomi ever have survived this?

Semyaza had knelt by the bed and was now pressing his forehead to his wife’s, murmuring to her through a disbelieving smile. Aziraphale looked away, feeling intrusive, and his eyes fell on Crawly — her arms red up past the elbows, her black robes drenched and reeking. He wobbled a little on his feet, tried to recover, then pitched out of the house with an urgent choking noise.

“What’s your problem?” Crawly asked, but when she followed him out the breeze blew her blood-soaked skirts against her legs. “Oh, right.”

“How could she have survived it?” Aziraphale said, hunched over with his hands on his knees; he’d just about convinced his corporation not to sick up the afternoon meal, but he wasn’t prepared to put it to any serious test. “That child couldn’t possibly have come out the usual way.”

“Er.” Crawly, flicking her fingers to clear the last of the red stains, looked guilty — if a demon could be said to do such a thing. “It took some doing. I think I just invented the Caesarean section, though we’re going to have to call it something else for the time being.”

“You saved her life,” Aziraphale said, only now realizing the significance of what had just happened. “And the life of her _half-angel child._ Oh, Crawly, what have you done?”

“What do you want from me?” Crawly snarled. “You don’t know what it’s like when — of all the ways these people can die, it’s got to be one of the ugliest.”

“Crawly, I don’t think you understand the dreadful impropriety of all this.”

“ _Impropriety_?”

“We’re not supposed to interfere —” 

_To this degree_ , he was going to say, but Crawly shrieked laughter, so long and loud Aziraphale’s attempts to interrupt went nowhere. “Oh, I think you’re well fucking past _that_ , angel,” she gasped. 

“There’s no need to be vulgar, demon,” Aziraphale snipped.

“I’m not the one who knocked her up.”

“Crawly!”

“What’s your fucking problem, anyway? Are you seriously angry at me for —” Crawly sneered and shook her hair back, defiance in every line of her body. “Would _you_ have let her die? Let them both die? Is that what Heaven wants?”

Aziraphale wrung his hands, unable to answer. Could he have stood by and let Naomi and her child endure such an awful death? If he’d known for _certain_ it was God’s will… but then She couldn’t really want such a thing, could She, or else why would a demon have been able to stop it?

“Answer me, angel,” Crawly said, coming close again. Her voice was soft now. Dangerously so, Aziraphale thought, but that was silly — as if Crawly could ever hurt him! “Would you have stood by and let them die?”

Her eyes were half-lidded, but the yellow shone so bright, and her breath was cool on his lips. “I… suppose I wouldn’t,” the angel admitted.

She smiled down at him, just a quirk of the lips, and drew a deep breath. “No, I don’t think you would,” she said, and then — before Aziraphale could think of a reply — she’d pulled away. “I should have a talk with the proud papa,” she said breezily. “His mother-in-law will teach him the basics, but someone should be on the lookout for anything, er, _unusual_ about the kid. Besides the obvious.”

“Yes, of course,” Aziraphale said, but by the time he’d gotten the words out through trembling lips, she’d already gone back inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: E. E. Cummings, "[i thank You God for most this amazing](https://artandtheology.org/2016/04/27/i-thank-you-god-for-most-this-amazing-by-e-e-cummings/)"


	5. the ceremony of innocence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale's first lessons in love, and its consequences. Heaven has plans for their little community.

Decades passed into centuries, and the children of the Watchers grew tall and strong — taller and stronger than anyone was really prepared for. Having been optimized to induce proper respect (Crawly said fear, but what did he know) in their core constituency, each Watcher stood close to seven feet tall, but a Watcher’s child equaled that before their tenth year and kept on growing. The angels’ families had drifted to the western outskirts of the town, where Arakiel had taught them how to build taller ceilings and sturdier furnishings for their staggering children. No one knew why the nephilim should be quite so large, but other than the need to arrange matters so that the angelic partner carried the pregnancy, there didn’t seem to be any reason for concern.

“Goodness,” Aziraphale said one afternoon, watching a group of twelve-foot-tall adolescents on their way to shul. “Still at it, are they? I had hoped perhaps it was a passing fad.”

“Aw, angel, don’t be such a prude. Call it the spirit of collaboration and free inquiry.”

“I am not a prude _,_ Crawly, I simply don’t see the appeal.”

“No?” Crawly gave him a patently fake leer. “You’re not into all those sssexy human things like sweating and farting and, and diseases?”

“Really, now, I can’t imagine.” Aziraphale gave an equally fake shudder and emptied his wine cup. “I suppose one could get past that if their lives weren’t so short. Four or five hundred years hardly seems like enough time to get used to someone before they’re dead and you have to start all over again.”

“Good thing we don’t have to worry about that,” Crawly said. Aziraphale blinked, surprised at the demon’s sudden warmth, and Crawly folded back into himself. “You know. Hate to have to break in a new Adversary every few centuries.”

“To be sure.” Aziraphale’s tongue stuck out of his mouth just a bit as he carefully filled his cup again. He might not see the appeal of any individual human, but he’d been watching them fall in love for a long time now, and it never got any less enchanting. The light in a young one’s face at the sound of their beloved’s voice; the timid pride of new lovers meeting each other’s eyes and seeing their choice confirmed; the jolt of anticipation at the most casual touch. He saw, too, couples and groups who’d been together for dozens or hundreds of years, each one bettered by the long practice of cherishing and being cherished — perfectly at ease with each other, and yet still liable to be distracted by each other’s presence, the world falling away and leaving only that glow of desire and affection.

Of course he saw the appeal, but it had never seemed to be for him. Not that he’d felt the lack of it, exactly, but he just couldn’t imagine anyone looking at him like he outshone the whole world. He pushed the much-attenuated wineskin at the demon across the table, who had fallen into contemplation. “Such a serious face. Do buck up, Crawly, I won’t leave you to deal with the giants on your own.”

Crawly smiled back at him, his keen eyes gone a little dreamy. “I know you won’t,” he said.

* * *

The annual harvest festival had become a celebration of the Watchers’ first real attempt to become part of the community, and the festivities represented everything they had brought to it: more music, more lights and colors, better food — _much_ better wine, Crawly noted with pleasure. They held it in the nephilim’s part of the city, where the taller buildings ringed a broad space flattened by years of dancing feet. Dinner was winding down, a few determined stragglers working away at the remnants while the band tuned up. Young people in their finest waited in anxious red and gold clusters, anticipating or dreading the first dance. 

Aziraphale, unusually, hadn’t joined them for the harvest feast. The flutes had just started a preliminary tune when he hustled up to where Crawly was practicing his standing lounge, breathless and ink-splattered. “Oh, drat, I’ve missed dinner,” he said. “I got so wrapped up in helping Abi finish copying their manuscript on medicinal herbs that I quite lost track of time.”

“I got you, angel,” Crawly said, producing a napkinful of pastries from his sleeve. “Some of those apricot things, and the ones with nuts. And dates.”

“Oh!” Aziraphale beamed at him, making him feel even looser in the legs than usual. “Thank you, my dear, that was very kind.”

“Tell the whole blessed world, why don’t you,” Crawly groused, and took a pull from his wineskin to give his thoughts time to settle. “What do you need with medical texts, anyway? You can just —” he wiggled his fingers.

“Well, of course _I_ don’t need to use the texts, Crawly. That’s not the point.”

“So you admit it, you’re collecting useless texts.”

“Bite your tongue. The point is —” Aziraphale gestured for the wineskin — “the _point_ is making sure there’s a record of human accomplishments. Just think, if there were only one copy of a work, how easily it could be destroyed and all that knowledge lost!”

“And I suppose,” Crawly said casually, “that if someone needed to consult a work they didn’t own, they could borrow it from you.”

“Er.” The angel blanched. “I suppose… if they were very, very careful, and if they promised they would wash their hands, and, and bring it back _at once_ when they were finished…”

“Kidding, I’m kidding.” Crawly couldn’t help laughing at the angel’s outsized distress. “Maybe you can set up a reading room so you can keep them under the watchful eye of Heaven.”

“Oh, yes, that would work,” Aziraphale said, all smiles again. He took a longer drink, as if to soothe himself after such a traumatic suggestion, and Crawly watched his throat work as he swallowed. Watched his mouth, tight against the mouth of the wineskin. 

“Give that here,” he said, more roughly than he meant to, and drank deep. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t get something out of watching Aziraphale eat and drink anymore, but he could still pretend he didn’t know what it was, or why it meant so much to feel the wineskin against his lips, warm from the angel’s own.

The first dance of the evening was in full swing now: Watchers, humans, and nephilim joining hands, laughing at the stooping and straining it required. Aziraphale bit into a pastry and made a happy little sound as he savored it, licking his sticky fingers afterward. Crawly clutched the wineskin so hard his nails almost punctured it. He really ought to go do anything else, like his job, but the night was young. Surely no one would notice if he didn’t get started right this minute.

“It really has gotten quite pleasant here,” Aziraphale said softly, and he must have meant the town but he was looking at Crawly. Crawly was about to say something devastatingly clever. Any minute now. But enough time passed that anything he said would be awkward, and he was still gawping at Aziraphale like all the brains had fallen out of his head. 

“Well, that won’t do,” he finally muttered. “There’ll be no interest in sin if everyone’s happy.”

“Quite God’s kingdom on Earth, don’t you think?” Aziraphale beamed, which was always hard to bear, but then he suddenly went all soft and anxious, which was worse. “Oh, but — not like _that_ , of course. Not the Millennium. I’m sure there’ll still be a place for some sort of temptation.” And he reached out to pat Crawly’s shoulder, twice, light and quick as though he feared being burned. Or bitten. 

But nothing happened, and Crawly was far too stunned to object, even if he’d had the good sense to do so. Aziraphale smiled again, with that devastating little wiggle of happiness. “After all, it would certainly take a very _talented_ tempter to lead people to sin if there’s nothing to be unhappy about, wouldn’t it? Someone who knew how to remind them that they have choices. They’ll need that, with all these angels around, won’t they?”

Crawly felt that old, slow smile growing on him the way it always did around this ridiculous creature. How did they let him out of Heaven with such a cheery disregard for the proprieties? They’d taught him to fret and second-guess his impulsive kindness, but they couldn’t make him forget it entirely.

“Suppose so,” he said. “Wouldn’t want you people getting complacent.”

“Oh, I hardly think we could,” Aziraphale said, looking sidelong at him under his lashes, and Crawly caught his breath in shock at the bright wave of feeling radiating from the angel. It was Lust, if it were possible for Lust to be _pure_ — clean and warm as the summer sunshine, a wholly innocent yearning to cherish and share. _There’s still so much I don’t know about you,_ it said, _so many lovely things to discover. Would it feel good to touch you? Would it make you feel good too? Don’t you want to find out?_

Oh, it was like drinking sun-warmed water on a hot day, it quenched your thirst but left you needing more. He’d stopped seeing the dancers, stopped hearing the music; he could only feel Aziraphale’s bright, affectionate desire washing over him. Without thinking, he reached out his hand, and his trembling fingertips encountered an open palm — _waiting for him_. The angel’s skin was so soft, so warm where his was always cold, and a resounding tremor went through him like a struck bell as they linked their fingers together. Crawly met Aziraphale’s timid, hopeful look for just a moment, and it made his eyes sting and his chest ache. It was the sweetest thing he’d ever felt, sweeter than the embrace of Heaven, even if he had to look away from the unbearable light of it.

Maybe you could make life something of your own here on Earth, he thought, even if you’d originally been conscripted or evicted or otherwise knocked off the path you thought belonged to you. He tightened his grip on Aziraphale’s hand, just a little, and the responding squeeze felt like iron bands around his heart, a physical pain he wouldn’t give up for the world. The music went on, and they watched without seeing as all the people danced.

* * *

Uriel handed the blueprints to Noah, looking somewhere above and to the left of his head. It was something the other angels had had trouble with at first, looking humans in the eye. “Here’s your assignment, full documentation included. You use cubits, right? Dimensions in cubits, materials, construction methods. Two of every… let me double-check this…” she flipped through the accompanying binder. “‘Of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark, to keep them alive with thee; they shall be male and female.’”

Noah looked at Aziraphale apprehensively, who shook his head; Uriel hadn’t told him anything yet. “‘Of fowls after their kind,” she continued in a drone, “‘and of cattle after their kind, of every creeping thing of the earth after his kind, two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.’ And whatever it is they eat, that too.”

“That’s... a lot,” Noah said.

“The animals will come to you, at least,” Uriel said. “The food you’re going to have to deal with yourself.”

“Some of the animals, er, eat other animals,” Noah said. “Any suggestions about that?”

“You’ll work it out,” Uriel said, and clapped the binder shut, stacking it on top of Noah’s armful of plans. “All right, I think we’re done here. Aziraphale, you’re with me.” Noah looked at Aziraphale as though pleading for someone to make sense of all this, but Aziraphale made an apologetic noise and followed Uriel out to where Michael waited for them.

“You should keep an eye on the deliverable here,” Uriel told him, “but there’s something else first. The Watchers are being placed in restorative personnel realignment as of this morning. We need you to take point on the internal rendition procedures.”

“I beg your pardon,” Aziraphale said, feeling the familiar sense of bafflement he got whenever one of the archangels talked, “but I’m afraid I don’t quite understand.”

“Fine,” said Michael, “they’re suspended and we need you to round them up. Is that simple enough for you?”

“But whatever for?”

“You mean you don’t know?” Michael said. “I knew you were naive, Aziraphale, but surely even _you_ noticed.”

“Inappropriate representative-client liaisons,” said Uriel. “Fraternization resulting in anomalous reproductive outcomes. Disclosure of proprietary information.”

Aziraphale felt very, very cold. “And… the humans?”

“Oh, they’ll be dealt with,” Michael said. Incredibly, she was _smiling_.

“Synergistic paradigm shift,” Uriel murmured, almost to herself.

“This is my district,” Aziraphale said, “and these people are under my protection. I really must insist on knowing —”

“ _You_ don’t insist on _anything_ ,” Michael hissed, suddenly inches from his face. “You may not have fucked anyone yourself, but don’t think we’re going to forget that it happened on your watch. Consider it a mercy we’re not holding you responsible.” 

Aziraphale took a deep, shuddering breath. He wanted badly to press the issue, but what came out of his mouth was “The Lord is merciful.” It tasted like befouled water.

“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” both responded by rote. Michael sniffed at him and turned away, disappearing with the motion. 

He braced himself for another round of buzzwords from Uriel, but she was looking off over his shoulder. “It’s easier to explain if you come with me,” she said after a while. “There’s a plan.”

“Is there?” he said weakly.

She put her hand on his shoulder. For just a moment, she let him see her grief, behind the insulating layer of euphemisms, but he saw nothing like his own doubts and fears. She wanted to share with him her sadness, and her unquestioning acceptance.

“Trust the process,” she said.

* * *

West of the valley, in the desert, was a place they called Dudael: God’s cauldron. Ringed with stony outcroppings, it was a place of many winds, the steady currents from the desert breaking on its walls and tumbling over the edge with a whistle and a howl. Many years before, the small community searching for better land had camped here for a few weeks, the position being defensible against larger animals and whatever children of Eve’s firstborn might spot their fires. The waiting was hard, but the wilderness wasn’t safe for the children and disabled; indeed, two of their scouts, strong and skilled, hadn’t returned. The Watchers had ringed them on the hills above, bearing impassive witness as the few huddled humans beneath their feet held each other, told stories, cried and slept and chewed the tough grasses to stave off their constant hunger, praying for hope to a God whose agents watched them suffer and did nothing.

Aziraphale remembered it now as the Watchers followed him over the ridge, silent and downcast. He hated their bleak resignation, how they’d fallen in line when he came for them, as if somehow they’d always expected to pay for their happiness. They could have fought him off, all two hundred against one, and he almost wished they had — but where could they hide from the wrath of Heaven? And how much greater would it have been for their defiance? 

As the ranking angel in the area, he thought uneasily, he might be able to get the penalty reduced by taking responsibility; he might even get them off the hook entirely, pleading their relative inexperience and good intentions. But then he remembered what Michael had said to him, and the fond way she’d smiled at the thought of further consequences to come, and he decided perhaps it was just as well to get on with the job.

Uriel had given him the plans for the sequestration facility ( _prison, just say prison_ ) Heaven had designed to hold the Watchers until their final disposition ( _execution_ ). When he had finished constructing it, it reminded him a bit of a honeycomb with squared-off cells: each just big enough for one angel to sit alone, each with a door that, when closed, would not open again. The little spaces looked cramped and unwelcoming, their rigid perfection only emphasizing the bleak contrast against the brown earth that would soon shut them out from the sky. He wished he could add something to it, some touch of color or softness to relieve all that dead gray. Or perhaps he could take away some of those walls, open the spaces up a bit so they could see each other. Surely there was no harm in that? No one could begrudge them that bit of solace.

“I see we’re to be extended every courtesy,” Semyaza remarked, peering over the edge.

Before Aziraphale could answer, there was a familiar sound of rushing wings behind him, the one that always put his teeth on edge. “Good work, Aziraphale,” Gabriel said, and Aziraphale braced for the slap to his shoulder that followed with its inevitable sting. “Very clean, very compact. Efficiency, that’s the key.” 

“I don’t suppose,” Aziraphale said, very quietly, “that it could be made a little… nicer? Since they’ll be living here.”

“Ha! That’s my Az, always second-guessing himself.” Gabriel gave him another good thwack, on the arm this time, and Aziraphale jumped. “You did a _great job_ , buddy, you can be proud of this one.”

Aziraphale turned away to avoid Gabriel’s toothy smile and found, too late, that Azazel had come up on his blind side. “Are you?” Azazel said, looking through him — down, it seemed, to the bottom of his soul, where all his sins lived. “Are you proud of this one?”

He couldn’t speak under those eyes, the eyes of all the Watchers on him now. He managed to shake his head a little, but even that felt impossible under the weight bearing down on him.

“Come on, everyone, take your places,” Gabriel said from somewhere, but Aziraphale’s ears were ringing and he could barely breathe. “Stalling won’t keep off the Judgment Day. Let’s see some hustle!”

Aziraphale didn’t know what he would say even if he could speak. That he was sorry for following the Plan? Sorry for God’s will? Monstrous presumption. Gabriel could tumble him into that living grave on the spot. He knew he should have the words for this, some righteous words, the one correct and acceptable answer, but he could only shake his head.

Azazel smiled bitterly. “Her judgment is coming,” she told Aziraphale, “and that right soon.” Then she turned away, releasing him to breathe and see and hear again. Semyaza took her hand, and under Gabriel’s satisfied smile they led the Watchers into the prison of the underworld.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title, W.B. Yeats, "[The Second Coming](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming)," making its inevitable appearance as a staple of apocalyptic musings.
> 
> According to the Book of Enoch, Uriel was sent to deliver God's message about the ark to Noah, and Raphael was ordered to bind Azazel under the desert. 
> 
> In the Islamic tradition, Raphael is known as Israfil. Doesn't that sound familiar to you?
> 
> Just a little alternate theory for everyone to consider.


	6. only death makes such a sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Storm's coming.

“I never took Noah for a drunkard, but he’s fucked up on something, all right.”

“Wait, Noah did something interesting?” Crawly laughed, swinging into a free seat at the table. “Come on, pull the other one.”

The old man grinned. “Now, you hellspawn, show some respect for your elders and betters. Would I lie to you?”

“You’re neither, and nothing’s stopped you before.” Crawly signaled for two drinks.

“I wouldn’t lie when the truth is this good. Thank ya kindly.” They toasted, and the old man emptied his cup with a professional flick of the wrist. “Old Noah’s gone out to the hills to build a boat.”

“A boat? What, there’s no lakes up there.”

“There’s no lakes would fit this boat. He says it’s meant for his family, their families, and a whole passel of livestock besides. Says a big storm’s comin’ and we’d all do well to follow his example.”

Crawly laughed. “Big storm? Is Chazaqiel pretending he can predict the weather again?”

“Oh, no, it’s not an angel, it’s God Herself told him.” Crawly stiffened, but the old man didn’t notice. “So he says. I don’t see why he thinks he rates that, if I’m honest.”

“No kidding,” Crawly said, fishing a coin from his pocket with numb fingers. “You said the hills? I gotta see this.”

As it turned out, he’d hardly needed to buy the old man a drink; he could see the keel being laid from the doorway, it rose so high in the distance. A mad thing, absolutely ridiculous, there wasn’t a body of water that would hold such a boat any closer than the sea. And there was no way someone like Noah would do a daft thing like this unless. Unless.

“Aziraphale,” he hissed under his breath.

By the time he reached the crowd of rubberneckers laughing at Noah’s project, he was running flat out. Aziraphale was watching them from a short distance, wringing his hands together, and Crawly nearly skidded past him altogether before grabbing onto his arm as an anchor. 

“What’s going on here?” he demanded. Aziraphale trembled and looked away, and Crawly shook him in frustration. “It’s Her, I know it’s Her, what did she tell him? _”_

“Let go of me, please,” Aziraphale said in a miserable little voice.

“Not until you tell me.”

“I don’t answer to you,” Aziraphale snapped, except it sounded more like a sob. Crawly let go, stung. “In case you’ve forgotten, I, and _all_ my colleagues, answer to the Almighty. And She is sending Michael to make a great flood, to cover all the land. And… well.”

“So everyone gets in the big boat? What’s the point of that?”

“Er.” Aziraphale looked away. “The Ark is actually for the, well, the beasts and birds and whatnot. So they can repopulate the region after…”

“After?” Crawly grabbed Aziraphale’s arm again, but the angel wouldn’t look at him. “After everything else is dead? And what about all the other people?”

“Crawly, please,” Aziraphale whispered.

“ _Why?_ ”

“Because of… oh, everything that’s been going on here.” Aziraphale finally looked at him, and Crawly almost wished he hadn’t, so painful it was to see the misery in his face. “The Watchers were never meant to share all those things they know with the locals, as it happens, and they certainly weren’t meant to have _offspring_ with them. It’s been decided that they’ve interfered too much and the whole thing has to start over again.”

“ _All_ of them?” Crawly said again, very quietly. He wanted to shake the angel until a better answer came, begging him — _tell me you aren’t a part of this, tell me you won’t let them do this. Tell me I wasn’t wrong about you._

“It… it isn’t my place to question Her.”

“Oh, right.” Crawly bared his teeth in a growl. “Heaven forbid you forget your _place_. Whose place is it to say hey guys, just a thought, maybe we should rethink the whole _drowning children_ part of the Plan? Or did it just not come up?”

“Crawly —” Aziraphale protested.

“Tell you what, Aziraphale, if this is how your people handle disobedience now, I'm _glad_ I got out when I did."

* * *

Aziraphale turned and stumbled down the hill, feet slipping in the loose dirt, his head ringing and his whole body numb. It was monstrous, it was unbearable — sickness and hunger were almost unknown now, the humans lived longer and happier lives than ever, they reveled in the innocent joys of art and music and storytelling, and was all this to be destroyed so casually? 

He had to get inside. He felt like everyone must know what was coming, must see him and assume he had something to do with it. But that was the trouble: the thought had never occurred to him. He’d had a moment’s doubt about the _propriety_ of angels begetting children by humans, but there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. The archangels had realized it was wrong, right away. What did it mean, that Aziraphale simply hadn’t?

He knelt before the small chest in his dwelling and opened it, looking over his precious scrolls and codices and tablets. He’d taken such pleasure in sharing and collecting what he now saw must be forbidden knowledge. He hadn’t realized that was a sin, either.

_Why did She send the Watchers, if not to help? Why give them that knowledge and forbid them to share it?_

No, no, that was the demon talking, that was the poison he’d been feeding them all along. If he, Aziraphale, could no longer tell the difference between virtue and sin — if he was so blind, so _stupid_ as to blithely accept what Heaven deemed a capital crime — it must be because he’d spent too much time with an agent of Hell. 

And if he’d sometimes thought… if he’d sometimes felt there might be the same kind of happiness for him in this world as there was for humanity, and for the Watchers, he was just as wrong as they had been. Worse, though, so much worse, he might have been able to pass off the nephilim as an innocent mistake, but what could possibly be innocent about —

“Aziraphale,” Crawly’s voice said, startling him so badly he cried out.

“I really can’t talk to you right now,” Aziraphale said, gathering tablets into his arms and pointedly not looking at the demon in his doorway. “These have to be destroyed.”

“Your texts? Aziraphale, no, listen —”

“I’ve done more than enough of _that,_ ” Aziraphale retorted. “We all have. Do you think I don’t know the part you played?”

“Well — well —” Crawly spluttered. “Well, if it was so wrong then why the _fuck_ did Heaven let it go on this long? Why didn’t they do something before it got so bad they decided they had to _kill kids_?”

“Ours is not to question the Plan,” Aziraphale said automatically. There was no conviction in his voice or in his heart, only a dreary resignation.

“There’s got to be a better way. You can’t kill _kids_ , Aziraphale, we’ve got to stop this.” Crawly took hold of Aziraphale’s shoulder, but his fingertips touched bare skin at the neck and Aziraphale flinched away, eyes wide with fear. Crawly snatched his hand back as if the touch had burned him — because it had, and not with the heat he’d once hoped for.

* * *

A note on sin.

A common joke among history enthusiasts is that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. A similar observation may be made about the Seven Deadly Sins, more accurately described in demonic circles as the Six Useful Desires.[3] Lust, greed, envy and the like are not sins in themselves, whatever the monks may have thought, but overindulgence therein leads easily to breaking the actual Commandments even without occult assistance.

Two sins rarely named as such are far deadlier, and far more attractive to angel and demon alike. One is Despair, the total extinction of hope that can only follow total loss of faith. Many an angel has followed the desolate chill of Despair into hovel and mansion and eased it with the hope of Heaven; many a demon, on the same trail, has brought a soul back to Hell that same night.

The other is Shame: the faithless fear that God cannot, or will not, forgive your sin.

_Sinner, sinner, sinner_ , Aziraphale’s shame hissed at him, hateful and cruel. _Wicked, filthy sinner. Debased, degraded, unclean._ It burned into his once-innocent desire for Crawly, poisoning it and yet lending it a hideous new strength, harder to resist and all the more perilous to give in to.

Crawly clenched his fists as a full-body wave of nausea hit him. Leveraging Shame was one of the easiest tricks in a tempter’s portfolio, and the very slickest, sickest part of him told him he could do it now. _Yes you are_ , he could say, _my own little sinner._ He could practically feel how the angel would tremble as he twined his arms around him, taste the dark sweetness he could infuse into his voice. _Might as well give in to it,_ he would croon into Aziraphale’s ear, one hand stroking the pulse at his throat, the other slipping lower. _There’s no place in Heaven for you now, but I’ll take you, take you, take you..._

Never. No. Never. He scrubbed his hand against his rough robes, trying to erase the feeling of the angel's skin. He wanted so badly to pretend he hadn’t noticed anything, but it didn’t take a demon to see the humiliation in Aziraphale’s eyes. “No, no, angel, I didn't mean — that,” Crawly pleaded. “I would never, not if you didn’t want...”

“I don’t blame you, my dear, it’s in your nature.” Aziraphale tried to give him an angel’s tolerant, condescending smile. It was the worst thing Crawly had ever seen. “To seek to, ah, gratify those base urges. I know you didn’t mean anything by it, not really.”

“You know that’s not true.” Crawly opened his hands, helpless, desperate. “Please. Please, Aziraphale, say you know me better than that.”

Aziraphale finally looked him full in the face. His eyes were wet with tears, and Crawly realized with a shock that so were his own. “I do, Crawly,” he said, and regret trembled in his voice. “I do know. But… it would be better if I didn’t. For everyone.”

There had to be something that would shake them both out of this horrible moment of renunciation. Crawly was sure he had known it once, but that was a language he no longer spoke. Instead, his voice grated in his own ears: “For everyone?” 

Aziraphale shut his eyes, and Crawly had lost him. 

“The Watchers thought it would be all right, you see,” Aziraphale said. One hand touched the face of a clay tablet gently, almost tenderly. “As long as they tried to do their best by the humans, to protect and cherish them, then they thought it would be all right to get closer to them. Even to… to love them. But it wasn’t.”

_I didn’t know_ , Crawly wanted to say, but of course he’d known, he’d claimed credit with Hell that very day. Even Aziraphale, so willing to believe the best of people, wouldn’t miss a lie right now. _They shouldn’t have asked me_ , he thought next: truer, but irrelevant. Humans could fool themselves that they weren’t really sinning, and apparently angels could too, but demons couldn’t; sin was too integral to their nature for that self-deception to work, even when they wanted it to. He hadn’t outright lied, but he had used all his powers to deceive; of course they shouldn’t have trusted him, but whose fault was that _really_?

“If the punishment had fallen only on them,” Aziraphale went on, “perhaps they might have thought it was worth the risk for the happiness they had known. They might even have been right.” He shook his head. “They were very happy, Crawly, but… they aren’t the only ones who will pay for it.”

“I never meant for that to happen,” Crawly said, and that _was_ true. The hand of God had cast him into Hell and he still hadn’t realized She could be this cruel.

“None of us did,” Aziraphale said wretchedly. “But we know now, and we can’t risk… anything like that. Not if this is what’s going to happen.”

“We don’t know that it would, though. It’s not the same.” Crawly swallowed hard. “We’re not the same.”

Aziraphale shook his head, tears streaking down his face. “Crawly, I can’t take that chance.” 

“But —” 

He reached out again, he couldn’t help it, and Aziraphale scrambled backward, nearly tripping over himself to avoid Crawly’s touch. “I _can’t_ ,” Aziraphale cried, cringing against the mud wall, shaking in terror. “Stop, please, you have to stop —”

A sickening pain lanced through Crawly’s heart, something like contempt and protectiveness mingled, and he thought, _is this the thing they say is divine? The pity God feels for Her children? No wonder She doesn’t mind destroying them, if loving them feels like this._

There was nothing more for him to say. He tore down the curtain covering Aziraphale’s door, and left the angel there alone.

* * *

The Watchers’ first two children had married just a few years ago — fifty? Had it been that long? — and the community had been alive with celebration. Now Crawly could hear the keening of outrage and misery as he ran through the streets of the nephilim’s city, could feel the jagged gap in the heart of everything where the angels, not just blank-faced observers now but friends, lovers, parents, had been torn away from their homes.

He found Azazel’s eldest daughter outside, leaning on her hoe (which was taller than him) and looking steadily at the clouds gathering in the west.

“Crawly,” she said to him. “Where is my mother?”

He shook his head, trying to catch his breath. “Heaven’s people,” he managed after a while. “Took them all. Dunno where.”

The nephil looked down at him mildly. He felt like a snake among the roots of a tree, looking up and up at a fruit shining bright in the sun.

“God’s going to destroy you,” he said. “She thinks you’re a mistake and She’ll wipe out the whole region to erase you. The humans won’t listen, they don’t know what She is, but I do. Do you believe me?”

“Should I?” she asked. “They say the Devil is a liar. They also say a serpent speaks the truth, but only to his own purpose. What does it profit you, to save me?”

“One truth? If God wants you dead, the Devil wants you alive.” He shook his head. “That one will do for Hell, if they ask.” 

“And the other truth?”

“Don’t ask that of me.” Crawly shook his head and, with a great effort, pushed it all away: the realization that Heaven had set itself on death and misery as surely as Hell ever did, the desire he’d only learned to name in losing all hope of it, the bright sweet face he would never see again. “Find your children. Spread the word. We leave at sunset.”

* * *

When the rain began in earnest, Aziraphale retreated to Heaven. It was the last place he wanted to be, but Gabriel had made it clear that he wasn't wanted on the Ark, and there wasn’t anywhere else to go. He stepped out of his corporation for the first time in a thousand years and left it to drip on the rack, ignoring the quartermaster’s glare. As pleasant as that body had become to him, an old and comfortable friend, he couldn’t stand the feeling of it now. He thought leaving it would feel like a weight lifted, but instead it felt like coming unmoored — leaving behind the only safe harbor for the rudderless bark he’d become.

Aziraphale drifted, half-formless, over to the wide window that showed the world of humanity from end to end. The Flood looked small, from this distance, a minor expansion of the Mediterranean. A slip of the cartographer’s pen. You wouldn’t know how many lives had flourished in that valley, how they had thrived at last after so many years of privation and danger. You wouldn’t know, unless you had been there, how many were dying in the merciless waters.

This was his punishment, he realized. He had failed to trust in God’s plan when he gave away his flaming sword, and then he had failed to trust in God’s mercy when he dodged Her question about it, and for his sins he would suffer in doubt. 

“I gave it away,” he whispered, but it was too late for that sort of amends now. He simply had to try, as best he could, to submit his judgment to the will of Heaven. One day, when he had mended and proved his faith, all would become clear. He would laugh at himself, then, all his fears — how simple it would all be, and how foolish to doubt it! It was only a matter of time. He had not been cast out, and there must be hope for him yet. All he could do was wait, and obey, and trust the process.

### Footnotes

3. Sloth, leading at most to failure to live up to expectations, has been excluded from the list as inconsequential.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: Odetta, "[Yes I See](https://youtu.be/nhim_3COwQU)"


	7. visions and revisions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Having confronted their respective roles in the fate of the Watchers, it's time Aziraphale and Crowley decided what to do about it -- because Heaven and Hell are on the move.

“Kind of figured you had a hand in it somehow,” Crowley said at last, pulling his knees up to his chest in an uncommonly protective gesture. Aziraphale fought the urge to complain about shoes on the sofa. “If you hadn’t been useful to them, they would’ve locked you up too.”

Aziraphale contemplated, then rejected, the idea of a drink. Some things ought to hurt exactly as much as they did, no palliatives allowed. “Perhaps that would have been the righteous choice, to resist.”

“‘Perhaps’?”

“Yes, all right, I’m sure it would have been very noble and inspiring and it wouldn‘t have done anyone a lick of good.” He folded his arms tightly across his chest, knowing he looked sulky but not caring. “I don’t suppose you would have done any differently.”

“It’s not the sort of mistake you make twice. And we’re not talking about me,” Crowley added hastily, seeing Aziraphale’s eyes gone wide. “We’re talking about you, and why you suddenly think you owe anyone _anything_ when it wasn’t even your idea.”

"Because I'm tired of pretending I didn't do anything wrong!” Aziraphale shouted, startling Crowley’s feet to the floor. “All those times I defended the indefensible and you wondered if I was more coward or fool —"

"No, angel —"

"Oh, you must have done. I did! Every time I justified Heaven’s… no, I _will_ say it, Heaven’s _crimes_ , every time I said it wasn’t my idea, I wasn’t _consulted_ , I thought — I thought —" Aziraphale buried his face in his hands to stifle a sob.

“Come on, Aziraphale, don’t do this to yourself.” Crowley tried to pull his hands away, and Aziraphale shook him off angrily.

“Please, just let me say it for once!” he said. “I thought... it was my fault I didn’t understand. I thought I was just too weak to see how good and righteous it all was. And every time I felt like my heart would break, I thought, well, let it!” He looked up, finally, and saw with amazement that Crowley’s eyes were wet too. “Let it break, if that’s what’s keeping me from seeing the Plan. And I was afraid… I wanted to see, but I was afraid, because the other angels saw the Plan and they seemed so _cruel_. But if I was like them, I thought it wouldn’t hurt anymore.”

Crowley shuddered, but he made no move to hide or wipe away his tears. It was a gift, Aziraphale realized, letting him see that shared pain, without turning away. “Oh, my dear,” Aziraphale said, coming over to sit next to him. It seemed natural, for once, to put an arm around him, to offer him comfort. The demon made a small, unhappy sound and stiffened up, but he still let the angel pull him closer.

“We can’t fix the things they made us do,” Crowley said. “We shouldn’t _have_ to. Wasn’t our idea.”

“We can fix this, perhaps,” Aziraphale said. “Even if we don’t have to.”

“The Watchers lost _everything_ , angel, setting them free won’t change that.”

“And that means we should do nothing?”

“Not if it means —” Crowley clenched his fingers on his knees. “Do you really want me to say it? Don’t you _know_?”

“I do know, my dear.” _Not if it means putting you in danger. Not again._ He patted Crowley’s hand cautiously, wishing he could soothe the cramped fingers. “If you think I’m not concerned as well — but then of course you know I am. I very much doubt there will be any risk, but even if there is, I think I must take it.”

“Penance?”

“Partly. But think about the future as well. I thought you were talking nonsense before, about Heaven and Hell against humanity. But this looks rather like it, doesn’t it? They couldn’t fight each other, so they may well mean to join forces and fight all of us — you, me, and the humans — with the Watchers to bolster their ranks.”

“Or they’ll get us out of the way, and then turn on each other,” Crowley said sourly, “when they’ve salted the universe and there’s nothing else left to kill.”

“I wouldn’t want to lay money against that,” Aziraphale said. “That’s why I want to get to the Watchers first. I’d say our side is going to need all the help we can get.”

“Assuming they won’t just fuck all the way off somewhere and leave us all to it.” Crowley shrugged. “Think I would, myself.”

“After being treated that way, one could hardly blame them.” Aziraphale clasped his hands in his lap with a sigh. “But they loved humanity so much, Crowley, in ways you and I never did — oh, don’t give me that look, you know perfectly well what I mean _._ I mean wanting to live _with_ them, not only among them. And because you were stronger than I was —”

“Oi!”

“Because you were stronger, and braver, and you can frown all you like but you won’t stop me — a _better person_ than I was, some descendants of those children might still live. It might mean nothing to them now. It might mean everything. I’m not sure.”

Crowley sighed and leaned against Aziraphale’s shoulder. It was a rare gesture, and all too soon he would fidget about and make some excuse about being “too bony” — as if Aziraphale minded! — but for now it felt like a declaration. “We’ll find out, one way or the other,” he said. “I just wish you knew as much about it as everyone keeps hinting you do. Or was that just to make me ask awkward questions?”

“Quite possibly,” Aziraphale said. “I think, however, we might not be entirely in the dark.”

“Hmm?” Crowley sat up, and Aziraphale struggled with a momentary impulse to pull him back down on his shoulder again.

“Well. You know that little chest the humans helped me put together was my first book collection.”

“I know, angel.”

“Of course I had to get rid of it. Practically everything in it was forbidden knowledge.”

Crowley blinked once, deliberately, as he sometimes did when thinking hard. “Aziraphale.”

“Yes?” Aziraphale felt an inexplicable twinge of nerves.

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”

“Well, I may have… er.” Oh, drat, his silly face was going pink.

“ _Angel_ ,” Crowley said, awed. “You _didn’t_.”

“Just the one!” Aziraphale said. “And it was only a very little one, so I thought, oh, what harm could there be in —” but Crowley was cackling now, his whole body shaking off the tension, and Aziraphale couldn’t help a chuckle himself.

“M’sorry,” Crowley managed at last. “M’not laughing _at_ you. Just —”

“You may, if you like,” said Aziraphale, smiling. “It _was_ awfully foolish of me.”

“All your best ideas are. Like making friends with a demon.”

“Yes, I don’t know what I could have been thinking.”

Crowley smiled — not a smirk or sneer, but that rare warm, uncomplicated smile. Aziraphale would have done anything to see that smile, if he only knew how to raise it consistently. “So what made you keep this one?”

“Ah! I can show you.” From his watch chain, Aziraphale pulled a key that hadn’t been there before and went to unlock the humidity-controlled case that housed his most precious works. “You see, the Watchers’ knowledge made up the majority of the texts produced in those days. Humans had the most marvelous oral traditions, but they had only just begun trying to put their stories down in print, and they tended to start with things they themselves had seen or heard.” He turned to smile at Crowley, a locked archival box held reverently in both hands. “Or, in this case, dreamed.”

Aziraphale had laid a blessing on all his books, of course, but for his oldest items that was only the start. The box holding the papyrus codex he’d rescued from the Flood, and the acrylic that encapsulated each scrap, were imbued with specific protections against rot, mildew, and all the many ills to which the page is heir. “I wouldn’t advise this treatment for a document that had aged normally — the fibers would be far too fragile,” he explained, lifting the pages one by one from the box and setting them in a neat row. “Not to mention the necessary deacidification process, which would probably disintegrate it.”

“Gosh,” Crowley said, trying to sound too cool to be interested but failing. “And where were you keeping it all this time, hmm?”

“Don’t be vulgar _,_ my dear. I kept it in the same place I keep my wings.” He laid his fingertips on one of the pages, thinking about hidden things. “I suppose this wasn’t my first rebellion, or even my second. But I couldn’t very well argue that this one was misplaced kindness.”

“Misplaced, eh?”

“Oh, you know what I mean. What _they_ would think.” Aziraphale felt the familiar little twitch across his shoulders and wondered how long it would take to stop flinching every time he thought of Heaven. “They wrote me up for that more than once, but I always thought it was a contradiction in terms. Just because grace may not have the effect _I_ desire does not mean it has been wasted.”

“Even if the bastard didn’t deserve it?” Crowley asked,

“Who among us does, really?” Aziraphale clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Right, enough of that. Do you know, I haven't actually looked at this since Azazel gave it me? I always meant to, before, but there always seemed to be something more urgent. And then, afterward…" He felt his enthusiasm go flat all at once, as if someone had stepped on it.

Crowley craned his neck, looking at it sideways from one angle, then another. "Was this your first human prophecy, angel?"

"It was." Aziraphale looked at his feet. "And all this time I’ve been too afraid to read it." 

* * *

“It can’t possibly be this important to you,” Dagon said, staring in disbelief at the slide counter on Gabriel’s impending PowerPoint presentation, which read an ominous **1/240.**

“It was _right_ ,” Gabriel insisted. “I’m not just going to let it drop because it’s inconvenient or whatever. I want justice.”

“Izz this justice?” Beelzebub inquired. A fly whined in Gabriel’s ears. “It feelzz more like a grudge. Not that we disapprove, but there izz a certain degree of inefficiency involved.”

“We do not hold grudges,” Sandalphon said primly. “We’re following up on a prior disciplinary action.”

“So you can heave them into the pit of fire,” Beelzebub said. A howling scream sounded from far down the hall outside, as if to illustrate the process. “Original.”

“Well, yes, that would be the ultimate point of this discussion,” Michael said. “It would be foolish to simply release them. That might imply that the initial decision was incorrect.”

“Clemency is a decision taken in light of new information,” Uriel said. “Since the Great Plan was cancelled —”

“Postponed,” Sandalphon said.

“Delayed,” Gabriel said.

“Suspended,” Michael said.

“— _stopped_ ,” Uriel said, “I think it’s worth reconsidering our post-eschatological agenda.”

“Absolutely not,” said Gabriel. “I can’t believe you would _defend_ — I mean, it was _disgusting.”_

“I’m not _defending_ them,” Uriel said, “I’m just questioning the utility —”

“You’re talking like you can just waltzzz on in and scoop them up,” Beelzebub said, “but Hell doesn’t give up its claimzz that easily.”

“Don’t you talk about your _claims_ to me, buddy,” Gabriel said, and the discussion went off the rails.

Dagon looked down at her sad little folder. Nothing much of use in it: a few policy memos and a partial list of perpetrators, its other pages lost to the damp. All at once she wanted to bite Gabriel’s nose off. Nose-biting was not an unfamiliar urge with her, but its strength in this case surprised her. Honestly, she’d be willing to let the whole blessed choir go free if it meant getting her teeth into that arrogant celestial nose.

Just then, she looked up.

Uriel was looking right at her. Almost as if she’d read her mind. Had she? Oh, fishsticks, she was nodding. And — was that a _smile_?

Dagon nodded back. Uriel got to her feet.

“I need some air,” she said, which was nonsense, because the air up here tasted worse than anything Dagon had ever encountered, and given that her office was downwind from the forgers in the Eighth Circle, that was saying something. It hardly mattered; Beelzebub’s voice had risen to its worst mosquito whine, and Sandalphon was bellowing like a televangelist, and everyone else was too busy trying to get their own bit in between to notice that Uriel had even left, or that Dagon had followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: T.S. Eliot, "[The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock&sa=D&ust=1612117231072000&usg=AOvVaw2ZS6uxW2kTgAkY3f1Y5MHw)," and you're lucky that's all the Eliot you're getting from me in this one.


	8. clear the way for the prophets of rage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A voice from humanity's lost history points the way forward, if Aziraphale can only understand it.

The text of humanity’s first prophecy was large and uneven, lines in an unskilled hand wielding a crude brush. There was urgency in the strokes, as though the writer had felt clarity and meaning slipping away, a dream that faded on awakening. Aziraphale bent forward, tracing the lines with two fingertips. He could almost feel the incredible age of the text, even through the acrylic.

“If I’m remembering correctly,” he said, “this was written by Abra, Azazel’s wife. That would be shortly before the birth of their first child. Let me see... oh, dear.”

“What’s wrong?” Crowley said.

“I can’t read it.”

“What?”

Aziraphale smiled a little at the surprise in that word — Crowley had so much confidence in him, more than anyone else ever did. “No one on Earth or in Heaven has used this script since the Flood, Crowley. I _could_ read it, once, but it’s been so long —” He squinted. “And the penmanship isn’t terribly skilled. This is going to be more difficult than I’d anticipated.”

"I'll make cocoa," the demon said, which for him meant putting the ingredients together[4] and glaring at them until cocoa happened.

Aziraphale went over to his desk, picked up a book and put it down, picked up a paper knife and put it down, picked up another book and then just stood there holding it. Everything in his head seemed to have jammed up all at once, like a market square when a wagon overturned and everyone got in a fight about it. It even seemed to be making noise, the jumble in his head, an angry impatient noise that at any moment could turn into something worse if he couldn’t appease it, rage and recriminations, deafening. He tried to push it to the side like he did with everything else, but it wasn't going. _Side’s all full up,_ he thought wildly _, I’ve pushed too many things over there and it’s all coming back at once_...

"Where'm I putting this?" Crowley asked at his elbow. 

Aziraphale jumped and dropped his book. Angels are known for jumping even less than for dancing, but his feet quite left the floor, and the landing gave him a strange little shock.

"Crowley!" he snapped, feeling how unfair it was even as he spoke. "You startled me."

"I did, didn't I?" Crowley said quietly. He set the mug of hot cocoa down without looking away from the angel's face. "What's it all about, then?"

For a moment, Aziraphale wanted only to deny that it was about anything. Fine! It was fine. If it was fine, no one could ask him any questions about it. But he’d pushed poor Crowley to the limit with that business already, and all at once he was very tired of hiding his weaknesses. “I don’t know, but I hate it,” he said, flapping his hands at his sides, feeling twitchy and helpless. “It’s… too many things at once, to put words to. I can’t, I can’t —”

“Easy, there,” Crowley soothed, herding him carefully into his desk chair. “You sound like me trying to talk when I’m all, y’know —” He waved his hands stiffly, putting on a frantic expression. Aziraphale tried to smile. “Oof. That bad, huh? Here, hold onto this.” He put the warm mug in Aziraphale’s hands and cupped his own around them, giving a little squeeze before stepping back. “Now look, we want to get this figured out sooner rather than later, but nothing’s going to explode if you don’t do it right this second, you get me?”

Aziraphale tipped his head back against the chair back and heaved a few deep breaths. “That’s what I don’t understand,” he said, when breathing started to feel like less of an effort. “This didn’t happen when I was trying to find the Antichrist. It’s only ever when there _isn’t_ that type of pressure. Sometimes over the most trivial things.”

“So it’s happened before?”

“... yes.” Aziraphale’s eyes stung, and he looked away. He felt like a dreadful liar for having hidden it, and a weakling for having such a thing to hide in the first place. What must Crowley think of him?

“Hey, no.” Crowley crouched down in front of his chair. “I can hear you self-deprecating, stop it.”

“You can?”

“Er.” Crowley looked unhappy. “Not, like, specifics. But when someone’s getting down on themselves, yeah, I can feel it. It’s… Hell taught us to watch out for it, it makes people vulnerable.”

“Oh, dear. And here I thought I knew how to hide it.” Aziraphale tried a little smile. It felt watery and uncertain. “I feel I ought to apologize. Being around me must be exhausting.”

“Nah,” Crowley said. “Anyway I know where it comes from, don’t I? If I ever do get tired of it I know who to blame, and it isn’t you.” His eyes flicked upward and Aziraphale flinched again — _damn_ it! But Crowley either hadn’t seen it or had decided to pretend he hadn’t, rising up into an elaborate series of stretches instead. “Drink your cocoa, angel, take your time. I need to go check if you’ve restocked your Penguin biscuits.”

“But you don’t know where I keep my — ohhh, you _serpent_ , that’s why I keep running out!”

“No smiting til you’re finished, angel.” Crowley flashed him an excessively evil grin and disappeared.

* * *

He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, except that he’d worked well into the next day, and Crowley — who was hovering, but clearly trying not to let him notice, the dear — had topped up his cocoa at least four times and not-at-all subtly kept his little stack of biscuits replenished. Having no lexicon to work from, Aziraphale was forced to rely on his memories of those days, which took time to unlock; an angel couldn’t forget, but he could suppress quite effectively, and he had gone to great lengths to ensure that he wouldn’t remember the time of the Watchers by accident. The pain was fresh and immediate, since he’d never faced it head-on, and yet he felt it must be easier to bear now than before, when he had really thought the Flood was God’s will instead of Heaven’s spite. He was only now beginning to understand how badly that terrible time had wounded him — how badly he’d wounded himself, crushing the parts of himself that didn’t fit into the Plan, all to earn the favor of a Heaven that didn’t deserve him. At least now there was a point in facing it all, for the Watchers’ sake — and, though he hardly deserved it, perhaps for his own as well.

“I believe I have the gist of it,” he said at last, and Crowley ambled around the corner as if he hadn’t been lurking there for the past several hours. “What’s interesting here is that there’s no preamble, such as we see in later works.”

“‘Behold,’” Crowley declaimed, rather in the style of Charlton Heston’s Moses, “‘for I am the prophet Whoozits, son of Wossname, and I speak unto all who hath ears to hear and attention span to not fall asleep.’”

Aziraphale’s lips twitched, much as he felt unready to cheer up. “Just so. The impression is of one who wakes up from the dream and writes it down immediately, as if fearful of forgetting.” He straightened his reading glasses, which always made him feel like the sort of person who had a firm hold on things, and read aloud.

“ _Water drowns and earth buries. The years of the living shall be one in eight. The deathless carry man’s first power into the desert. A child of my children stays the executioner’s hand on the day long awaited. Let them throw wide the prison doors with the name that was left behind_.” Aziraphale realized his voice had risen a bit — it was difficult not to declaim when reading prophecy aloud — and cleared his throat. “I’m afraid it’s not much to go on.”

“I don’t know anyone who can translate prophet to English better than you,” Crowley said. “So what are you thinking?”

“Well, the first bit is just… what happened. The maximum lifespan of humanity was reduced to something like a hundred and twenty years, or roughly one eighth of what Methuselah managed. The Watchers went into the desert and were buried.”

“With man’s first power?”

“Come now, my dear, you of all people.” Aziraphale smiled, tentatively, and was thrilled to see Crowley smile back. “They didn’t just _give_ knowledge, you know. They learned a great deal as well.”

“Like how to sin,” Crowley said, his smile fading.

“Like how to _love_ ,” Aziraphale insisted. “What did Adam and Eve know of love before they knew good and evil? Neither its power nor its price, nor what they might have in its stead. You showed them it was a choice.”

Crowley tried for a dismissive snort, but choked on it a little and had to turn it into a cough. “That’s… a lot, angel,” he said, looking wide-eyed first at Aziraphale and then at the ceiling, as if expecting a bolt from above.

“I’ve had a long time to think about it,” Aziraphale said softly. “The Watchers, and all the outcast lovers since. Didn’t Heaven set the example of treating love as a sin? So much follows from that.”

“Please tell me you’re not blaming yourself for _all_ of it,” Crowley said.

“Hardly, my dear. I’m not responsible for subsequent interpretations.” Aziraphale shook his head. “You shan’t talk me out of feeling responsible for the Watchers, though.”

“Wouldn’t bother trying,” Crowley said, and a fleeting sadness touched his face — there and gone so fast Aziraphale wasn’t quite sure he’d really seen it. “So we need one of Azazel’s descendants, yeah? What are we even looking for, very tall people?”

“I shouldn’t think so, after all this time. Presumably it’s a matter of having enough of the supernatural in their makeup to survive the journey there, since the only way is through Hell. I just haven’t the faintest idea how to determine whether that’s the case.”

“It’s not going to show up on 23 And Me, that’s for sure,” Crowley groused.

Aziraphale, as he usually did when Crowley said something incomprehensible, ignored the interruption. “The only human being we know for certain to be descended from an angel — well, angel _stock_ — would be Adam Young.”

Crowley shook his head. “Kid committed to the fix. He’s Arthur Young’s son in _all_ the ways now.”

"Oh, well. It’s not as though we even know what his natural mother was."

" _Who,"_ Crowley snapped, loud enough that they both winced.

"I beg your pardon?" 

"She wasn't a _what_ , Aziraphale, she wasn't a… a _thing_." Crowley sighed harshly. "I know she was human. I don't know what happened to her after, but I can't imagine she had an easy go of it. Mothers never do."

“Oh goodness.” Aziraphale had had only the vaguest mental image, something between Yeats and Blake, but he suddenly saw, very clearly, what it would mean for a human to give birth for Hell. No abstract concept, this, but a real, individual person: a young woman with Adam’s curly hair and snub nose, wracked by the great pain of bringing forth life with none of the joy or love that might ease it, hopeless and abandoned to the mercies of Hell’s midwives. He knew why Crowley had looked away. “I didn’t realize.”

“Well, at least the kid came out human-shaped.” Crowley picked up a little plaster bookend in the shape of a Corinthian column and turned it over in his hands as if it might hold the key to their puzzle. “Your buddies weren’t the only ones messing about without protection in the good old days. It was usually worse, when we did it.”

“You must think I’m terribly naive sometimes.” Aziraphale shook his head. “All the things you’ve seen that I never even imagined.”

“It used to bother me before I knew any better,” Crowley said to the bookend. “Then it just felt like… it was a relief, you not knowing about any of that. Like I could go someplace where I didn’t have to think about it.”

Aziraphale came a little closer, until his shoulder was just touching Crowley’s, though at right angles — still looking away, still not wanting to see Crowley if he didn’t want to be seen. “I hope this has always been such a place,” he said. “Despite its proprietor’s occasional pig-headedness.”

Crowley put the bookend down and gave it a little pat. “That’s part of it,” he said, strolling away — though not, Aziraphale thought, in the way of a rejection. He was looking up at the skylight, where a thin greyish something that passed for light in a London fall filtered through the glass. “I also know no one gets in here if you don’t want them to. Remember that time Kingsley Amis was supposed to meet his publisher here and he kept getting lost?”

“He shouldn’t have called you names where I could hear him, my dear.” Aziraphale sighed. “But it’s not true, you know. I couldn’t keep Uriel out.”

“Oh, an archangel, _well_ ,” Crowley said. “They’re only something like a hundred times more powerful than you, but go ahead and blame yourself for not being able to take one in a fight.”

“It would make several things easier, if I could.” Aziraphale went back for another look at his translation. “You know, I think this narrows it down considerably. If we assume that the “day long awaited” is the day of Armageddon, then the executioner must be the Antichrist. And that would make the one who stayed his hand one of the humans who were there.”

“You’ve got something there,” Crowley said, looking more cheerful. “It’s a pretty weird lot overall, innit? Wouldn’t be surprised at all if Shadwell’s not human.”

“Do let’s leave him for last,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t think I can bear it if it’s him.”

### Footnotes

4. Aziraphale didn’t mind shortcuts in preparation, but he insisted that miracled ingredients never tasted right. Crowley, with his snake’s palate, was forced to agree.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: Public Enemy, "[Prophets of Rage](https://youtu.be/zcv3McUVyAo)"
> 
> Ever notice how everyone talks about Adam being human incarnate but no one _ever_ talks about his mother? I have some Feelings about that.


	9. las anyadas non azen sezudos, eyos non azen ke viejos

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aziraphale and Crowley set out to find the prophesied descendant, which would be easier if they had any idea what they were looking for.

They were met at the door of Jasmine Cottage by a tall, diffident young woman with clustering curls of black hair and purple-framed spectacles. “Hi,” Crowley said, trying to look non-threatening, though from experience he knew his best efforts landed him at “vaguely disreputable.” 

She blinked at them, started to say something that sounded polite without actually offering accommodation, then blinked again.

“Hello,” Aziraphale said with his sweetest smile, the one that said he loved all of creation dearly but _you_ in particular. “Do you remember us, dear? We didn’t exactly get a chance to chat. I think you’re the one who’s no good with computers.”

“Oh, hell,” she said, going white. “ _Anathema!_ ”

She disappeared in a whirl of broomstick skirt and Aziraphale tipped up on his toes, then rocked back on his heels. “I wonder how much either of them remembers. Human minds do seem to have trouble hanging on to the anomalous.”

Crowley could hear voices in the back, one edged with panic, one cool and confident. “Should think witches are better at it. Be inconvenient if they forgot every time a spell worked, wouldn’t it.”

The confident voice was coming closer now. “Rebecca, it’s fine, I can handle — oh.” Anathema Device halted mid-imposing-sweep and pulled her glasses down her nose, squinting bright-eyed at them both. “I really wasn’t imagining that part.”

“You do remember!” Aziraphale exclaimed. “My dear lady, I was hoping we could ask you a favor.”

“No deals,” Anathema said, eyes fixed on Crowley. “I don’t make deals with anyone who could be reasonably described as an _entity_. Personal policy, no offense.”

“None taken,” Crowley muttered, taking a bit extra and saving it for later.

“Oh, you needn’t worry about that,” Aziraphale chirped, which earned him matching eyerolls from witch and demon.[5] “This is all on a strictly volunteer basis. Now. If you wouldn’t mind lowering your wards so we can _both_ enter —”

“My mom would lose her mind if she saw me doing this,” Anathema said. “Rebecca, bring one of the kitchen chairs, please? I need to take this horseshoe down.”

* * *

There was tea, of course, because Anathema might not understand the English social necessities, but Rebecca certainly did. She proudly demonstrated her ability to operate the digital kettle without mishap — “I’m studying with a technomancer in Wolverhampton. It turns out you can’t do _that_ sort of damage to computers unless you have the ability to control them. I just had to, uh, figure some stuff out.” 

Aziraphale made the appropriate noises of polite interest, but Crowley had never had much patience for nonalcoholic social rituals at the best of times, and he’d spent the past few days projecting serene confidence for the angel’s benefit; it was, frankly, exhausting, and the inevitable delay while they waited for the fucking kettle was about to drive him around the fucking bend. Unfortunately, if Crowley suggested that tea might not be essential to every single social interaction on the fucking planet while Aziraphale was in this state, it might kickstart the existential crisis he was trying so hard to prevent in the first place. 

Was this how they were going to spend their retirement, Crowley thought as the preliminaries dragged on: racing around trying to undo divine injustices? No, Aziraphale was too realistic, and too lazy, to put this much work into something unless he thought there really was a chance of fixing it. It was most likely the _only_ chance of its kind the angel would ever have, Heaven’s other victims being long dead or damned. Crowley had no business stopping him from trying, and yet he couldn’t convince himself the risk was worth the payoff. Closure, in his experience, was overrated even when it came in a nice neat package, which it mostly didn't.

“A lot of things must have changed for you two as well,” Anathema said. “How did you even come to be working together anyway?”

“Well, you can imagine it’s a long story,” Aziraphale started. Crowley made a face. “Now, my dear, let me tell it this time, I promise to keep to the basics.”

“Angel, not once have you _ever_ kept to the basics.”

“I _can_ , if I’m not _interrupted._ ” Aziraphale sipped his tea, deliberately, and Crowley flung himself backward with a groan. Next moment he snuck a peek at the angel — yes, there was that little smirk he got when Crowley was being dramatic, he must be feeling better. “All that’s important to know about us is that we came to work together because… may I say it, my dear? It’s been a long shift, and we appreciated the company.”

Crowley hunched his shoulders up around his head in embarrassment, but the affection all mixed up in it warmed him all the same. “Yeah, yeah.”

“And once it came to a question of the world ending, well, we both realized we were rather more fond of the world, and of humans, than of anyone in our respective head offices.”

“Which _were_ pretending we never existed, for the most part,” Crowley said. “Except now they’re nosing about wanting things again.”

“I guess it was too much to ask for them to just… give up,” Rebecca said.

“Regrettably, yes,” said Aziraphale. “Anathema, have you ever heard of the Grigori? The Watchers?”

“The Watchers, really?” Anathema smiled a little. “Yeah, my _avuela_ told me about them, but like, as a fairy tale. I thought Enoch was apocryphal.”

“And who decided that, then?” Crowley said. “Christians?”

“Certainly I have issues with the selection process,” Aziraphale said, with the air of one still nursing resentments about the Council of Rome, “but one does see how certain books added unnecessary complexity to the narrative.”

“I can see that,” Anathema said. “Like, I think I _am_ actually having trouble with the part of the narrative where angels apparently fucked humans.”

Aziraphale pursed his lips in the way that meant _I am an angel of the world and I am most definitely not shocked by your language,_ which was one of Crowley’s favourites _._ “It wasn’t quite like that, my dear.”

Crowley grinned. “Oh, I recall it being _exactly_ like that.”

“Do you two ever take a break?” Rebecca wondered. They both glared at her. She looked insultingly innocent.

“Yes. Well.” Aziraphale settled his waistcoat. “The Watchers were, indeed, a real group of angels — well, they started as angels — and they did, ah, well, we all interacted much more freely in those days, all in it together, you know, and then —”

“And then there were some really gory bits we’re going to gloss over,” Crowley said, “and poof, giant babies. So Heaven decided, bugger this, we’re starting over.” 

“We know that, despite Heaven’s, er, best efforts, some of the Watchers’ children escaped the Flood,” Aziraphale said, with a fond look that made Crowley squirm again, “and we have reason to believe that one of those descendants was involved in the stopping of the Apocalypse, but we don’t know which.” He handed a copy of his translation to Anathema. “See what you can make of this, my dear. Unfortunately, the original wouldn’t do you much good. It was written in a language that hasn’t survived… not precisely the language of angels, nor the first language of humanity, but developed in collaboration between the two.” Aziraphale sighed. “It was really quite an exciting time. The Watchers were simply given knowledge upon their creation; they didn’t know what it was to learn, or to teach. The humans helped us all understand how to do that.”

“Why was Heaven against that?” Rebecca asked. Crowley gave her an appraising glance. He hadn’t been in a mood to notice much that day on the airfield, but he did remember thinking the great gawk with the glasses was something like a knotted-up garden hose in human form, all energy and no outlet short of coming apart at the seams. She’d clearly, as she’d said, sorted herself out in the interval, and she was becoming the sort of person who asks _why_.

“Oh, now there you get into dark magics,” Crowley said. “Or office politics, take it whichever way you like. The angel there will tell you it’s ineffable. I think it was short-sighted, putting them all down on Earth with nothing to do and expecting they’d just watch while the humans did all the fun stuff.”

“Be that as it may,” Aziraphale said, “it appears that we need assistance from a human of angelic descent. At least, that was my analysis.”

“I would agree, on a first reading,” said Anathema. “This is a little more straightforward than Agnes’s usual. Then again, I’m used to her, so I might have the wrong perspective.” She looked at Rebecca, then down at the paper again. “I was only a professional descendant in the human line, anyway… unless you think that’s where witches come from?”

“We don’t know,” Crowley said. “It could be that, some of them did teach a kind of sorcery, but they could just as well be, I dunno, geologists. Or astronomers. Diverse group, very interdisciplinary.”

“We think,” Aziraphale put in, “that we ought to be able to tell if someone is of an angelic lineage, even this many generations hence.”

“Problem is, we haven’t got anyone for comparison, so.” Crowley waved a hand vaguely. “We’re looking for something we don’t know what it is, and either we’ll find something but we won’t know if it’s the right thing, or we _won’t_ find something and we won’t know if it’s something we should’ve found or not, cos we didn’t find it.”

“Right,” Rebecca said. The others blinked. “So look at both of us, right? I don’t suppose being a computer wizard is anything I would’ve gotten from Heaven, though I guess I can’t rule out ancient aliens.”

“Now _that_ ,” Aziraphale said, with the head-toss of someone who’s just seen one of their personal hobby horses canter up with a lovely dressage saddle and a gleam in its eye, “is just nonsense. I was _at_ the building of the Pyramids and I can tell you with complete authority that —”

“— the Egyptians didn’t need aliens to build a great fuck-off triangle, yes, angel, we know. Stand down.”

Aziraphale subsided, though he cast a pointed glance at the August issue of _The New Aquarian_ on the side table. Anathema looked as if she was about to take the argument up again, but Crowley glared her into silence. 

“Anyway,” Rebecca said, with the look of one who throws a tennis ball into a room only to discover it’s a grenade, “if there’s only one, then it can’t be both of us, which means if we’re both the same then it’s neither of us.”

“Right,” said Crowley. Anathema and Aziraphale blinked again. “Never mind, angel, just look at them.”

“Right, yes,” Aziraphale said. “You shouldn’t be able to feel anything, but please tell me if you do. And I recommend you both shut your eyes. I may become… difficult to look at.” Both women shut their eyes immediately, and Aziraphale settled himself in his chair with a little wriggle. “Thank you. Let’s begin.”

To Crowley, jiggling one leg impatiently, nothing happened for an awkward length of time. He could sense how carefully Aziraphale was using his powers, seeking with a light, cautious touch. There was a slight shimmer in the air around him. Anathema looked rapt, as if trying to sense the spiritual contact; Rebecca looked embarrassed.

At length, the air cleared and Aziraphale’s body relaxed, but Crowley could tell the news wasn’t good. “Nothing, I’m afraid,” he said. “As Crowley said, I don’t know precisely what I’m looking for, but you both _appear_ to be perfectly ordinary human beings. In the genetic sense, I mean,” he added when they both looked a little offended. “Human all the way down.”

“I wonder where Agnes’s gift came from, then,” Anathema said. Crowley, who could practically hear Aziraphale’s glance toward Her throne, cut him off with a warning look.

* * *

“Oh, rats,” Aziraphale said outside. “I was quite certain I had it right.”

“Okay, so the kids?” Crowley said, holding the gate for him. “My money’s on the one who shanked War. I like her.”

“That doesn’t seem to fit as well,” the angel fretted. “Discorporating War was a great deed, certainly, but the prophecy seems to speak of a _single_ executioner rather than the four horsepersons.”

“On second thought, we might save them for last anyway, never mind the extra trip,” Crowley said. “They’ve already seen more of the backstage shit than any kid should. No sense bothering them unless we absolutely have to.”

“That’s very thoughtful of you, my dear, I quite agree.”

Crowley muttered something, trying hard not to go red. They walked on toward the Bentley in a familiar silence.

“Do you know how surprised I was when you came up to me at Golgotha?” Aziraphale said out of nowhere.

Crowley shrugged. “Not the best timing, I know. ”

Aziraphale shook his head. “I was certain you would never talk to me again, and I felt you had every right.”

“Yeah, I thought that too, for a while. I was a lot more… I dunno, I guess I still believed the advertising.” Crowley snorted and shook his head, feeling something close to fondness for his younger, stupider self. “I thought Heaven was actually supposed to be different from us, or what’s the point, you know?”

“Not unreasonable,” Aziraphale said softly.

“Turns out three thousand years doing Hell’s work gives you some perspective.” Not to mention he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about that last conversation; awful as it was, the angel had as good as confessed his feelings, even in forswearing them. Crowley wasn’t going to be able to stay away forever, no matter how mad he’d been at first. Not if there was even the slightest chance that someday, no matter how far distant, Aziraphale might finally believe it was safe for them to be — more to each other.

He had thought there might be, when he had finally spoken at Golgotha.

Was there still?

Aziraphale still _wanted_ Crowley, a demon couldn’t be mistaken about that. A demon knew desire, and all the shades of guilt and insecurity that could stifle it. Crowley would have made the first move by now if that had been all, but there was something else in play, some obstacle he could neither name nor understand. Something that kept Aziraphale silent when he so clearly yearned to speak, kept him suffering when he must have known Crowley would have done anything to relieve it. Crowley had thought the mystery would resolve itself after they’d been freed, but instead it was more opaque than ever. If it hadn’t been fear of Heaven and Hell, then what could it be? 

It wasn’t like he’d never messed with things he didn’t understand, but with all his firsthand knowledge of the many ways that could go wrong, he wouldn’t take the chance — not where Aziraphale was involved. Not until he knew what the angel still feared.

* * *

Deep in the third circle of the infernal archives, a beetle demon scuttled head-first into the half-collapsed stacks of antediluvian paperwork, collected before Dagon descended to the title of Lord of the Files and never since reckoned with. Unlike most of Dagon’s temps for this project, Lucille wasn’t allergic to the infernal mold, and her eyes needed little light, so they’d collectively “volunteered” her for the deepest diving. She’d grumbled enough to make them feel like they’d gotten one over on her, but in reality she didn’t mind; the papercuts stung like nothing else, but it beat working Admissions.

What she was looking for ought to be a sizable bundle or folder of paper, but Satan only knew whether those long-ago file clerks had done _anything_ sensibly, so she resigned herself to examining each individual sheet. She had established a sort of cavern for herself, braced with an upended drawer, and she stacked each sheet neatly when she finished with it. 

The walls of paper shifted, as they often did, and a minor avalanche ensued. Lucille waited, stock-still, to see if the whole thing would come down. When it didn’t, she sighed and shuffled the fallen sheets into a neat stack with all four hands. A flash of white sticking out of the wall caught her eye — real, actual white, not grey or yellow, uncovered by the landslide. Carefully, she teased it further out. It was a letter-sized envelope, fat and white and gleaming, and it made her fingertips itch.

“ _Yesss_ ,” she hissed, yanking it out. Bad idea: that was a load-bearing envelope, and the cavern collapsed halfway on top of her head. Didn’t matter, though, because it read WATCHERS - INTERIM DISPOSITION on the front, and that was it, she was gonna get the bonus Dagon promised — that’s how she knew it was really important, department heads don’t offer incentives beyond _not_ getting a red-hot poker lodged in places you’d rather stayed empty. Not unless it’s a _big_ deal.

Which meant… it was a big enough deal to be worth examining thoroughly, before handing it over. Just in case.

### Footnotes

5. One certainly can make a binding contract with an angel, if one isn’t careful. They may not be as well-known for purchasing souls as their demonic counterparts, but they aren’t above a spot of market manipulation.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: "The years don't make people wise, they just make them old." [Ladino proverb.](https://www.heyalma.com/14-ladino-phrases-every-jew-should-know/)
> 
> Anathema's family is Sephardic Jewish on her mother's side and their mother tongue is Judaeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino. And she is currently testing the truth of this proverb with the two oldest people she will ever meet.
> 
> The beetle demon Lucille belongs to one of my very favorite writers, [entanglednow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/), who has kindly allowed me to borrow her for an homage. She hails from [There Will Be Forms To Fill In](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21817429), which is hilarious and sweet and _wildly_ NSFW. I love her and, like Dagon, she speaks straight to my office manager's soul.


	10. a woman that hath a familiar spirit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The closer they get to a solution, the more trouble Aziraphale has holding it together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for description of mild dissociation.

“The Sergeant’s just across the hall, you know,” Madame Tracy said, ushering them into her dim, paisley-draped flat with a flutter of organdie. The combined odor of several dozen scented candles and a dozen more highly-perfumed toiletries pushed back at Aziraphale like a wall barring entry, but he bravely persevered. “Shall I step over and invite him? He’s felt a bit at loose ends, now he’s not got his witchfinding to keep him busy.”

“Busy,” Crowley scoffed. “He took our money and did fuck all with it for fifty years but hoard newspaper clippings.”

“Put a lot of work into that, he did,” Tracy said from the kitchen. “And I do hope you’re not overlooking the contributions of Major Cupboard and Private Milk Bottle.”

“Wait, what?” said Crowley, who had never looked over Shadwell’s invoices and thus had never noticed he was being billed for the labours of kitchen appliances, dry goods, and lo, unto the seventh generation of Smiths. 

Aziraphale, who had finally done so the day after Armageddon and still felt _very_ stupid about it, gasped and put a hand to his heart. “You knew he was a — a flimflam man?” he breathed in shock.

“What,” Crowley said, and put his head in his hands.

“Oh, we old frauds recognize each other on sight,” she said smugly. “He got lazy after a while, there’s no denying it, but if the two of you missed the obvious that’s hardly his fault, now is it?”

“I don’t think I have to take that from you,” Crowley said, “seeing as how you fell for his — _charms_.” 

“Tcha! If I’m ever that hard up you can drop me straight in the grave. Honestly, the assumptions people make.”

“At any rate,” said Aziraphale hastily, “we did hope to ask him some questions about — last summer — but we also wanted to talk to you. If you don’t mind.”

“Well, I suppose,” she said, “though I should think you know most of what I saw just as well as I do, given how _intimately_ we shared the experience.” Her arch look was nearly as unbearable as Crowley’s obvious glee at it.

“That’s just it,” Aziraphale said, fighting (in vain, he sensed) to hide his discomfiture. “I find that the memory of the time I was — er —”

“Possessing,” Crowley suggested.

“Riding,” Tracy said.

“ _— accompanying you_ to be, well, a bit spotty. I think it has to do with seeing it through an unfamiliar lens, as it were.”

“‘Through a glass, darkly,’” she quoted. Crowley raised an eyebrow. “Yes, well, as you like.” She brought tea in on a tray whose worn paint declared it a Souvenir from Blackpool. Aziraphale took his cup carefully, in both hands, to conceal the tremor that had been coming on since they’d left Jasmine Cottage. It wouldn’t do to worry Crowley worse than he was already, poor thing.

“We’re on the track of an old prophecy,” Crowley said. “One of those that doesn’t make any bloody sense, which is most of them. What can you tell us about when we’d all arrived there?”

“Well,” she said, setting down her tea and placing her hands demurely on her knees. “You came up in the car that was on fire, and _he_ —” nodding toward Aziraphale with that same look of sly amusement — “was ever so pleased to see you, and there was a great deal more talking than I thought was _strictly_ necessary when you both havemagical powers, but…”

“It’s not _magic_ ,” Aziraphale snipped before he could stop himself. 

“Terribly sorry,” said Tracy, batting her long spidery eyelashes, “is that not right, then? _”_ Crowley grinned again, damn him; the fiend clearly enjoyed Madame Tracy chaffing Aziraphale almost as much as he enjoyed doing it himself. 

“Just… go on,” Aziraphale said, giving up.

“Anyhow, we came to a sort of standoff,” Tracy continued, “and Mr. Shadwell had that terrible great gun of his, but he wouldn’t shoot the boy Adam when Mr. Crowley told him to. And _really_.” She turned a disapproving look on Crowley, who quailed unexpectedly under it. “I know he’s rather a nasty old man, but I never took him for the murdering sort and I don’t know who would.”

“He had the gun, didn’t he,” Crowley muttered.

“As if he knew which end went first,” Tracy scoffed. “So then Mr. Aziraphale grabbed the gun, and he tried to shoot the boy himself — using _my_ hands, if you please, which naturally I wasn’t about to stand for. So I stopped him, and that’s when the lad noticed —”

“Wait,” Crowley said. “Wait wait wait.”

“Oh my goodness,” Aziraphale said faintly. Because yes, now he remembered. He’d taken the gun, feeling its antique weight — _lends weight to a moral argument_ , Heaven said, and he’d always told himself he didn’t _really_ believe that. Even Crowley, laughing at him, hadn’t thought he believed it. But he did, didn’t he? When it came right down to it, he’d thought there must be a way to just… smite your way out of a bad situation. Like he’d always been taught.

"You can't kill children!" Tracy had said, as Crawly had said so long ago, but angels can, and do, and no one can stop them — or at least no one ever had, try as they might. He was an Angel of the Lord, bent on the most holy and righteous cause of defeating the Antichrist, the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings et cetera, and she’d simply swatted him out of the way as if he’d been an insect buzzing in her ear.

“Stay the hand of the executioner,” Crowley said. “It’s _you_ , angel. You were the executioner. And she’s the one who stopped you.”

“Yes, I — I suppose I was.” Aziraphale felt a little dizzy, and then suddenly he felt quite ill, and he slumped forward, burying his face in his hands. The tremor he’d been fighting off overtook him completely, and he felt a little sound of some kind escape him, but he couldn’t hear it.

“Something to drink,” Crowley said from far away. The sound of Tracy’s reply was muted, and Aziraphale barely registered her movement out of the room. Everything felt grey and strange, and the air was stagnant in his throat. Then Crowley’s hand was on his back, rubbing slowly but firmly, up and down in a rhythm that fixed his attention. Unconsciously, he began to breathe in the same rhythm, in on the up stroke and out on the down. 

Things began to take their rightful places around him once more, though his body still felt numb, not quite his own; Crowley’s touch was steady but distant, enough to keep him from drifting away altogether but not quite enough to bring him all the way back. Just as well, Aziraphale thought vaguely, given the way his corporation too often responded to the demon’s proximity.

“All right, angel?” Crowley said. Aziraphale saw that he’d taken off his sunglasses, yellow eyes watching intently. “Here’s Tracy with the brandy. Everything’s fine.”

“No worries, love,” Tracy added. “I’ve had my seekers come over like this many a time, right in this parlor. It’s a stunning experience for them, speaking with the Departed.”

“Which they… didn’t,” Crowley said, his hand still moving on Aziraphale’s back. He didn’t quite hold the glass to Aziraphale’s lips, but when the angel cupped it in both stiff hands, Crowley’s hand cradled them in support. 

“They don’t know that. Besides, just because I don’t do it for that lot doesn’t mean I can’t _,_ ” Tracy said. “I don’t invite just anyone off the street into my bedroom, not without checking up to see they’re not stranglers or evangelists or Lord only knows what. Why would I invite _dead_ people into my _head_ when I can earn the same money with a bit of cold reading and a knocker under the table?”

“Safer to do a bad job than a good one, isn’t it?” Crowley said. “Keeps everyone’s expectations low. Can’t say I’ve never done it myself, but you’ve made an art of it.”

Tracy glared at him. “Rude, that’s what you are,” she snapped, with real venom. “What business is it of yours how I live, anyway?”

“Absolutely none, and I like that you told me so.” Crowley gave Aziraphale one last pat on the back and drew away. “I think we might be in the right place, angel.”

“What’s it all about, anyway? What is it you think I’m going to do for you?”

“We’re hoping,” said Aziraphale softly, “that you’ll help us — help _me_ to rectify a grave injustice. Only it was, er, part of Heaven’s plan for humanity, and we understand if perhaps you aren’t willing to… meddle with that.”

“I don’t,” Crowley said. “You can take my word for it, they deserve all the meddling they get.”

“The word of a demon,” Tracy said, and with the lamplight behind her Crowley saw the face of Azazel’s daughter, eyes searching out all his pettiest lies. “I don’t much care for that, or for Heaven’s plans either. You have to think I’m not in their good books as it is.”

“It’s really not like that,” Aziraphale protested. “The Almighty really did try, but human churches _would_ draw their own conclusions.”

“You’d think an _almighty_ God would be able to get the point across.”

“I really love where this is going,” Crowley put in, “and normally I’d be right up in it, but the angel’s not in fighting trim at the moment.”

“Well, at least you’re nice to somebody,” Tracy said. Crowley scowled.

“Yes, well, thank you, my dear,” Aziraphale murmured. “If I could just explain what we’ve learned so far, and then we can decide what action to take.”

The story was quickly told, this time. Tracy was familiar with the version told by humans, and for once little of importance had been left out, although the interpretations had added much to be deplored. “It’s big business these days, angels,” she explained. “They’ve got all sorts of magazines at the Tesco’s register, ‘Guardian Angel Healing Magick’ and that, and people think if it’s angels it must be _safe_ magic.” 

Crowley let out a sharp laugh. “Never seen a real angel, then.”

“Well, you don’t need to tell _me_. Of course most of it’s safe because it’s a load of old tosh, but real magic’s never safe, is it? Which is why I only do things I’m sure are nonsense, now.” Tracy shook her head, and Aziraphale wondered how she’d learned that lesson. “No one’s quite sure if your Watchers became demons or not, so I never messed with them one way or the other.”

“They didn’t,” Crowley said, “but they’re not exactly taking calls, either.”

“I see.” Tracy set her teacup down. “And if we do get them all out of there, where are we supposed to put them?”

Aziraphale blinked. He looked at Crowley, who didn’t blink because he wasn’t in the habit, but looked back at him with growing trepidation.

“You were really going to go in there and get two hundred people out of prison with nowhere for them to go,” Tracy said fondly. “The two of you, really. How’ve you lasted this long on Earth?”

“Logistics were never our strong suit, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale said, with something that should have been a chuckle but wasn’t.

“I can figure something out short-term,” Crowley said. “It won’t be pretty but it’ll be better than what they’ve got, I hope.”

“And the other thing?” Aziraphale said. “If — no, when — Heaven and Hell come for them?”

“I don’t expect they’ll wait long. That’s a fight we’ll probably have up front. I’m just hoping they’ll stalemate.”

“Somehow I don’t think we’ll be that lucky.” Aziraphale sucked in a sharp breath as the full reality of the task ahead crashed over him. “Oh, Crowley, we can’t possibly ask her to do this, it’s too dangerous. How could we ever promise to protect her?”

“We’ll get her out of there somehow, if it comes to that,” Crowley said, but he didn’t look very confident.

“If it comes to that, I suppose we’re all for it,” Tracy said. “Aziraphale, listen. This is something you did wrong, and now you want my help to make it right, yes?”

“No,” Aziraphale said, closing his eyes. “I _need_ your help to make it right. I can’t do it on my own.” He let his hands fall limp in his lap, utterly weary of fighting himself. “Perhaps I don’t deserve the chance to make amends; perhaps it’s selfish of me to ask you at all. But they don’t deserve _any_ of this, and I think… I hope it’s worth a try.”

“There, now,” Tracy said, patting his knee. “Where would we all be if we could never take anything back?”

* * *

On short notice, the best Crowley could do was a rented warehouse. “Just a few days, angel,” he said, noticing Aziraphale’s look at the camp beds he’d set out. “At least, if they haven’t all gone starkers down there. We’ll have to see what sort of shape they’re in before we set up more permanent accommodations.”

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said mournfully. He hadn’t meant to, any more than he’d meant to start crying, but there it was. 

The demon turned around and banged his head, lightly, on the wall. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, I’m an asshole,” he chanted.

“No, you’re right,” Aziraphale said, wiping his eyes impatiently with his fingers. Crowley, who’d never seen the angel without a properly pressed handkerchief, stared in dismay. “If they’ve… lost themselves down there, if they can’t be brought back, what can we do?”

“Lots of things,” Crowley said, “none of which you’ll like.”

“No.” Aziraphale straightened himself. “I shall simply have to provide whatever care turns out to be necessary.”

Crowley shook his head. “Look. You know I’m good for whatever. I just don’t know what I _can_ do, you know I’m not exactly the nurturing sort… hang on, why are you smiling at me like that? Don’t answer that, I don’t want to hear it.”

“Yes, dear,” Aziraphale said primly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: 1 Samuel 28:7 ([KJV](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Samuel+28&version=KJV))   
> Refers to the Witch of Endor, a necromancer, who at King Saul's behest raised the spirit of the prophet Samuel (you can imagine how displeased he was at that) and then made Saul sit down and eat something when he got weak in the knees and realized he hadn't eaten all day.


	11. forever in debt to your priceless advice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another descent into the Underworld, hopefully with better results than one usually gets.

Crowley took them there through a disused section of Hell, accessible only through the lower level of a defunct department store in Essex. Tracy hadn’t exactly expected the capital-G Gates of Hell, but the plain metal door with a NO ENTRY sign was still somewhat of a letdown. Aziraphale had his hand on her arm, ready to pull her back at the slightest sign of distress, but when she stepped over the threshold dividing one grotty hallway to another she felt nothing except a twitch between her shoulder blades, not pleasant but not quite painful either, like a numbed muscle trying to stretch.

Their route led them through a maze of claustrophobic corridors, doors sagging half-open to show abandoned offices piled with garbage and waiting rooms ankle-deep in muck. The air was rank, but also reassuringly undisturbed, thick with the stagnation of centuries. “Everyone stopped caring about Blasphemy somewhere around the Enlightenment,” Crowley explained, “so most of the department got moved over to Imperialism, and they still haven’t settled who gets this bit yet.”

“It hardly seems worth the fuss,” Tracy said. “Black mold all in the ceiling tiles, just look at it.”

“No, but it’s _empty_.”

“And all the devils are elsewhere?” Aziraphale said.

“Shut up.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Aziraphale asked her under his breath, as he’d done every two or three minutes since they began their descent. 

“I’m fine, dear,” she said, as she had every time. Normally she would add that he oughtn’t to worry about her, but of course he couldn’t help it, and it’d do him no good to be reminded of how worried he was. And she _was_ fine; whatever Hell was supposed to do to a live human being, none of it appeared to be happening to her. The thick coat Crowley had insisted upon kept off the chill, and if her knees ached a bit, that was nothing to do with anything but getting on in years.

The foetor and gloom of Hell, the creeping slime that she seemed to feel on her skin without touching it, made her look at Crowley with new curiosity. He’d worked hard to invent the man he appeared to be, that was easy enough to see. Did it make him tired, keeping up all those sharp clean lines? Did this place feel like home to him, a relief from all that work keeping up appearances? Or had he made himself so sleek to keep the filth from clinging to him? 

A sudden change of flooring under her feet startled her mid-speculation, and she nearly tripped over the rubber strip marking the transition. “Oh!”

Aziraphale and Crowley both jumped forward to catch her. “My dear lady —” Aziraphale began.

“Now, both of you, relax,” she said. “I just wasn’t paying attention, it’s quite all right.” She saw that, while the ceilings remained low and the corridor narrow, the walls had lost that coating of unspeakable nastiness. The floors, once rotting linoleum, were now clean low-pile carpet, and the ugly blue fluorescents had at least stopped their headachey buzz and flicker. “You’ve redecorated, then,” she said to Aziraphale.

“It’s more Earth here than anything else,” Aziraphale said, “but Heaven and Hell’s influences are both strong. You could say it really is neither here nor there.”

“Why are we friends,” Crowley said.

Tracy considered Aziraphale now, as she had Crowley, with the added advantage of having shared a head with him. He’d contained himself well enough to keep her safe from the full depth and magnitude of his power, so she hadn’t exactly learned all his secrets, but she’d _known_ him in the most essential way there was. If this stuffy, unlovely blandness belonged to Heaven, then he didn’t, no two ways about it. Small wonder he’d gone against them in the end, even without the deep, hopeless love he’d felt for Crowley to spur him on. _Not so hopeless as all that, either,_ she thought, watching the demon, whose sunglasses did nothing to conceal the way he looked at the angel. _If even one of you can get out of your own way long enough… well, easier said than done, innit._

The door, when they found it at last, looked like a supply closet if anything: plain gray metal, with a little wired-glass window. Crowley went up and tried the handle, for no good reason that Tracy could see except that he was the sort who needed to meddle about in everything. It didn’t work. 

“Can you see anything?” Aziraphale asked. 

“Not a thing.”

Aziraphale tried the handle himself, as if they hadn’t already gone over all the reasons why it wouldn’t work for him, which it didn’t.

Tracy reached out and laid her hand on the door handle. 

It still didn’t work.

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said, suddenly looking very embarrassed.

“I don’t suppose we can just break it,” Crowley said. 

“Might do,” Aziraphale said. “I did build it, after all.” He took a step or two back, gauging the distance, but Tracy shook her head.

“It’s not really a lock at all, is it?” she said, lifting her hand to stop him. “There isn’t a keyhole on this side, and I’d bet there isn’t on the other. It’s a… it’s an _idea_ of a lock.” She gestured at the ceiling tiles, the lights, the carpet, all impossibly mundane. “I mean, none of this is really what it looks like, is it?”

“It is, but it’s also more,” Aziraphale said. “I’m afraid it’s quite difficult to explain even if you’re accustomed to extraplanar operations. But you’re close. This is a real physical object in one sense, but it… _means_ something different.”

“It would be complicated, wouldn’t it,” Tracy said. “So we can’t drill it or break it, can we, because the metal isn’t the important part. It’s made of… you don't like it when I say ‘magic,’ but there it is.”

“Don’t let him fool you, he loves magic,” Crowley said.

“If you really think this is the time for pointless mockery —”

“It’s not pointless —”

Tracy put her hand flat on the door. “Once were Heaven’s, will be Hell’s,” she mused, “but right now they aren’t anybody’s. Who’s actually in charge here, anyway?”

Aziraphale and Crowley ignored her, as she ought to have predicted, being far too interested in what they would probably call a spirited debate but she always thought of as a Who Can Say The Most Words Loudest contest. 

“Excuse me!” she said, putting a touch of her professional voice[6] into it, and they turned to gape at her as if they’d forgotten all about her. _Likely did,_ she thought, _no eyes or ears for anyone but each other, it’s a wonder they get anything done_. “Can you tell me who’s actually in charge here? If it’s not Heaven and it’s not Hell, then who?”

“That’s just what we’re all trying to figure out, isn’t it,” Aziraphale said, and his shoulders caved in, and Crowley grabbed for him as if he feared the angel would collapse altogether — which was possible, Tracy thought, this whole business had him in a right state. Crowley clearly wanted to gather him up like a lost toddler, and he just as clearly wasn’t sure it would be welcome. He shot a wounded look at Tracy, as if any of that was her fault, and wasn’t _that_ just the last straw?

She turned to the door again and leaned against it, thinking of the prisoners inside. Heaven had set them to watch, silent and remote: to watch and do nothing, without compassion or conscience, as the first humans struggled and suffered and died. From what Aziraphale said (and didn’t say) she figured compassion was in short supply in Heaven, but the Watchers had watched long enough to learn what humans knew of grace: the love with which they’d sustained each other, through the deserts of exile. They’d given the gift of their knowledge and strength to humanity, and the humans had given love and kinship in return. 

Tracy had made it here alive because she had descended from Azazel, but if she had any right to open this door it came from her humanity, not her divinity. She clenched her fists, planted her feet, and reached again for the power with which she’d subdued an angel. In a voice of command that none of her discreet gentleman clients would have recognized — or survived — she said: “ _I DEMAND TO SPEAK TO SOMEBODY IN CHARGE!”_

The door flew off its hinges. Aziraphale squeaked and jumped back, or at least he tried to, but Crowley was still hanging onto him and they both went down in a heap, the demon’s absurd legs up in the air and the angel squawking like an offended cat. 

Tracy sighed. She didn’t much fancy barging in there on her own, but if she waited for those two to get it together, well. “Looks like it’s me, then,” she said, and crossed the threshold.

Under more of those awful fluorescents, the room was all white and gray, the air dry and acrid with the smell of synthetic carpet. The maze of gray half-walls stretched as far as she could see, a cubicle farm to rival the most sadistic imaginings of call-center designers. All throughout the room angels were turning to look at the door they’d never seen opened, heads popping up one after the other like rabbits from a warren, and Tracy had to suppress a laugh even as the tears threatened. All this time with nothing to look at and they were so excited, poor dears! 

The angel in the nearest cube stared at her with deep black eyes, gripping the arms of her chair with trembling hands. Seven feet tall if she was an inch, wings like a falcon, but Tracy felt a sudden desire to protect her anyway, a teeth-baring rage against the ones who locked her away here like a murderer, when any fool could see she was innocent as the day. 

“Hello, love,” Tracy said, going up to the angel Azazel and taking one of her hands, soothing it in both of her own. “They’ve done you dirty here and no mistake. D’you ever notice how much a cubicle is like a holding cell? Worse, really, don’t even get your own loo.”

“Do you have an appointment?” Azazel asked helplessly.

“Don’t be daft, family doesn’t need appointments,” Tracy said, patting her hand. “They say we’re related, anyway, though there’s certainly no one this tall on my mum’s side.”

The bewildered angel blinked. “Related? But I thought — our children —”

“It turns out someone had the presence of mind to thwart Heaven’s will in that respect,” Aziraphale said from the door. Crowley, behind him, tried to pretend he was hidden.

Azazel looked up, and her eyes, if possible, went even blacker. “ _Aziraphale_ ,” she hissed. “Come to pay for Heaven’s sins at last?”

“Only my own, I’m afraid,” Aziraphale said, coming forward with none of the fear or trembling Tracy would have expected — she’d thought he was near the end of his rope, but now that it was really happening he bore his guilt with more courage than she had thought possible. “No apology will pay for the time that’s been stolen from you, but you may have whatever amends I can make.”

“And if it were your life?” Azazel whispered.

“That’s not on the table,” Crowley said, stepping forward, his eyes burning yellow-white. The ghost of his wings hovered in the air like a shadow, ready at a moment's notice to manifest fully and shield Aziraphale.

“You would defend him, then?” the Watcher asked, her own wings flaring in a threat display.

“Never did like the ones where everyone dies at the end.”

“Please,” Tracy said, tugging on Azazel’s arm. “No one’s saying you have to make friends, but you can be right or you can get out of here. And you,” she said to Crowley with a glare. “Put those away, you tit, we’re not here for a barney.”

Crowley let his wings fade from view. He looked contrite, or maybe he was just trying not to laugh at her, but she’d take it. Azazel’s wings softened and folded, and she looked down at Tracy as at a hitherto undiscovered species — which, she thought with some humour, she might well be: the Lesser Flame-Headed Grifter, flightless but cunning. 

“You’re really going to let us go?” the angel said to Aziraphale and Crowley.

“Not much _letting_ about it, door’s right there,” Crowley said with a broad gesture. “I mean, probably you want to come with us, we’ve got some options, job retraining, night classes. Lot to catch up on, topside. But in theory you could just walk the fuck out right now and never see any of us again.”

Azazel stared at him. “You’ve gotten even stranger than when I knew you,” she said, “but I don’t think any of us is in a condition to hold a grudge.”

“Don’t worry,” Crowley said airily, “we’ll get you whipped back into shape and then you can hold as many grudges as you please.”

Azazel turned to the cubicles. “Do you hear?” she called, and her voice had the holy trumpet ring of old. “We’re free! We won’t burn!” A ragged, confused cheer greeted her words.

“Surely it can’t be that easy,” Semyaza said, coming out of the next cube. “The world hasn’t ended yet, and until it does we can’t leave, no matter who comes to open the door.” He looked Tracy up and down skeptically. “Is this how sorceresses dress now?”

“Cheek,” Tracy sniffed.

“Ah, yes, well,” Aziraphale said, looking distraught again. “That is, there was definitely an _attempt_ at ending the world, quite a credible one, and there’s been some disagreement since, as to whether it got far enough to trigger certain... contingencies.”

“I don’t speak Head Office anymore, Aziraphale,” Semyaza said. “Do you mind —”

“The Antichrist said no,” Crowley said. “Fill in the blanks later. Point is, it doesn’t matter if they didn’t tick every last box on the Armageddon checklist, what matters is they’ve spent the past six months sulking and pointing fingers and arguing over who’s in charge,and if we just _get a fucking move on_ we can have you out of here before they figure that out!”

“And not a moment too soon, if you ask me,” Tracy said. 

### Footnotes

6. She was, after all, asking questions of spirits.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: Nirvana, "[Heart Shaped Box](https://youtu.be/UThKn_TmfmM)"
> 
> Have I mentioned how much I love Tracy and want to see her in more things?


	12. that's détente, comrade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Heaven and Hell aren't letting anyone go free without a fight.

“So,” Crowley said in his most casual voice, waiting outside while Semyaza and Azazel collected the other angels from their cubes, “do we take them back to Essex, or…”

“You don’t think so?” Aziraphale said.

“It’s just, I feel like the management didn’t notice three of us going through the back way, but they’ll notice an extra two hundred.”

“Well, I did leave a back way out, just in case — out to the desert where I first dug the pit, before it got shifted to this plane. We can put a miracle together and bring them back to London from there.” Aziraphale shook his head. “I really did know, deep down, that there would be no reprieve. I just couldn’t bear not to _pretend_ there was a chance. I did a lot of that, I think. So many times...”

“Hey, hey.” Crowley checked to see that no Watchers were watching, cleared his throat, and stuffed his hands further into his pockets than they ought to have fit. “You asked me once if I had any regrets,” he said. “Still wanna know?”

“You know I would never pressure you,” Aziraphale said.

“That’s a yes if I ever heard one,” Crowley said. “The answer is: none worth keeping. They never made me smarter, or stronger, or better. They just hurt.”

“And it’s that easy, just to let them go?”

“Not even a little bit.” Crowley smiled at him, feeling weary but hopeful. “Come on, angel, let’s get these kids out of here.”

Aziraphale lifted his hand, and ahead of them a red EXIT sign flickered to life.

* * *

It was hard to know what to make of the angels who filed obediently up the stairs and out into the blasted, lifeless bowl of God’s cauldron, squinting at the light. Crowley had railed against Heaven’s cruelty and injustice in the first sunless days of the Fall, that being the fashionable thing to do, but he knew now that they’d acted out of simple fear; it figured that beings who’d never realized it was possible to question God would panic the first time someone tried it out. Heaven hadn’t become cruel and unjust until _after_ the Fall, which was what really burned; they’d had a chance to think about what they’d done, and try to find a better way, and _this_ was what they’d come up with. It didn’t do to think about that too much, though, not if you didn’t want to go all bitter and shriveled up inside.

This lot didn’t seem angry about their mistreatment, or even particularly sensible of it. It was nice to imagine that they’d all successfully navigated the five stages of mourning in their basement boiler room, but at the moment their wide-eyed silence felt more like numbness than acceptance. A few of the Fallen — a very few, whose names had since been lost — had gone that way: hit the ground and never got up. There’d been little compassion or fellow-feeling to keep them going, certainly no trauma counseling. He remembered passing one by as the walls of Hell rose to surround them, their blank eyes waiting for the relief of darkness. They were still there, as far as he knew, somewhere under the linoleum. Were these angels just in shock at a rescue they’d never thought would come, or was it something worse?

“Cold out,” Tracy remarked at his elbow. “I’ve never seen a sky so blue.”

“Air’s thin, too,” Crowley said. “Must be higher up than I remembered. How’re you holding up?”

“Can’t say as I prefer it for a vacation spot,” Tracy said, “but don’t worry about me, I’ll be just fine. It’s these poor lambs you need to keep an eye on. Didn’t think they’d ever see the sun again, did they?”

“They never should have,” a voice said from above. The clustered angels cried out and backed away, tripping over each other, and Crowley saw they hadn’t been numb at all. They’d been terrified, this whole time, of exactly what was happening now: Gabriel descending upon them, Uriel and Sandalphon at either hand and Michael in wait above, casting a terrible radiance over the wasteland. 

“Gabriel, it’s enough,” Aziraphale called, his voice resonant with anger in a way Crowley had never heard. “Five thousand years and more — haven’t they paid? More than it was ever worth?”

“You can’t just circumvent the disciplinary process because you _feel bad_ about it, Aziraphale,” Gabriel said. The thin air appeared to interfere with his flight calculations, and he landed upright, but rather harder than he’d been expecting. He grimaced and flexed his knees. “They committed an offense against the Almighty — a really gross one, honestly — and they’re just going to have to pay for it.”

“I’m not convinced the Almighty told you any such thing,” Aziraphale said. “I think you just found it… undignified. Distasteful. Like so many other human things.”

“Human things aren’t _for_ us, Aziraphale. That’s what I could never get you to understand. Frankly, I’m surprised you never went in for this copulation business.”

“Seems it’d be right up your alley,” Sandalphon put in, and if Crowley hadn’t been dead certain he wasn’t intellectually capable of double entendres, he would’ve put his fist directly through that smarmy gilded smile.

“Of course I didn’t.” Contempt sat strangely on Aziraphale’s face. “I’m surprised I ever spoke to a human again, after what you — after what _we_ did to the Watchers.”

“We’d be better off if you hadn’t,” Gabriel said. “Everything would have gone _just fine_ if you hadn’t gotten so attached.”

“Did She make us just so you’d have something to kill, then?” Tracy asked.

Gabriel glared at her, arching his wings over her head. She met him with a hard look, but Crowley could see her fingers trembling where the cuffs of her heavy coat almost hid them. “She never made _you,_ ” he spat. “Your kind should’ve drowned with the rest of the sinners.”

“And just who do you think stopped you?” Tracy flung back at him. “If that really was God’s will, then why am I here?”

“Stop!” Azazel grabbed her descendant’s shoulder. “Please, this won’t help. Heaven has no mercy for us. Making him angry won’t change that.”

“You don’t belong to Heaven anymore,” Aziraphale said. “They renounced you.”

“I’m sure as shit not giving them to Hell,” Gabriel said. “If you’re going to be like this you can just go iback in the box with the rest of them, Aziraphale. Maybe we can actually have a proper war without your interference.”

“I’ll kill you first,” Crowley said, as if he had a prayer — a hope — a chance of anything but getting his head snapped off like a daisy in a stand-up fight.

“Oh, like you tried to in Heaven?” Gabriel sneered. Crowley tried _very_ hard not to jump, but Aziraphale ruined it by gasping. “Yeah, didn’t think we’d figure it out, did you?”

“It must have been Michael,” Aziraphale said. “You couldn’t have figured it out if I‘d drawn you a picture book.”

Azazel sighed. “What did I _just_ say.”

“They don’t belong to you _or_ Hell,” Crowley said, “you can’t just _own_ them.”

“Actually, you can,” said a voice from the exit. Dagon stood there, carrying a pristine white envelope, with a chitinous little demon behind her. “You just need the right paperwork.”

“No,” Aziraphale whispered, his face gone slack with sudden despair. “Oh please, no.”

“We knew it was coming,” Crowley said. He looked around at the gathered observers, made an internal calculation, then discarded the results and took Aziraphale in his arms. Aziraphale caught at one hand with both of his own and held on hard, trembling. “Don’t give up on me yet, angel.”

The beetle demon scuttled over to them as Dagon stepped forward, brandishing the envelope triumphantly. “Chin up,” she chittered, tugging on Aziraphale’s sleeve. “It’s not what you think.”

“How long were you two standing there waiting for the right moment?” Tracy muttered.

“Long enough to know you’re going to enjoy this.” The demon clacked her mandibles sharply. “Shh!”

Dagon grinned, all her teeth sharp as fishhooks. “I have here, in my hand,” she said, “the transfer paperwork for two hundred angels of the first circle, previously known as Grigori or Watchers, administratively sequestered for a period of indefinite duration to be terminated after a decisive and final result of the Battle of Armageddon —”

“Yeah, whatever,” Gabriel said, “give me that.”

“Ssst!” Dagon spat, jerking the folder away from his reaching hand. “Not so fast, fathead. You see, someone in your administration filled out one form with all the generic details, and then made two hundred copies of it. I wouldn’t allow it in my office, but Heaven always was lax.”

“So what?”

“So,” Dagon continued, “they put a different angel’s name on every copy, see — at the top, here — and handed the whole stack to you. And _you_ , like the crashing idiot you are, ran that stack through the auto-signer without looking at it. _Including the blank original.”_

“Wait,” Crowley said, suddenly catching the glee that danced in Dagon’s black eyes. “They handed you a _blank signed authorization?”_

“ _I know_!” Dagon screeched. “I thought I was going to fucking _die_ — look at this shit, I can’t believe.”

“Told you,” Lucille said smugly. “I got a promotion out of it.”

Dagon held the form out, and everyone leaned closer — “Wait. _Wait,_ ” Gabriel said.

“Hoist by your own petard,” Dagon said smugly. The space for EMPLOYEE NAME at the top bore the same sigil as the space for AUTHORIZATION at the bottom: Gabriel’s true name.

“That’s not valid! How do you even know my true name?” He grabbed at the form, but Lucille skittered in front of him on all sixes and he tripped, giving Dagon time to dive behind the first line of Watchers. “You can’t just copy it, someone gave it to you! Who told you? This is — this is _bullshit!”_

Azazel let out a whoop of laughter, and then had to put her head between her knees to keep from fainting. Semyaza patted her back, looking absolutely poleaxed. Tracy was giggling quietly and hysterically into her hands. And Crowley, holding Aziraphale tight against him, watched in awe as two hundred angels closed ranks in defense of a Lord of Hell.

“Can’t have it both ways, big boy,” Dagon said as Sandalphon helped Gabriel to his feet. “Either all of these are valid, or none of them. And if they’re all valid, they — and _you_ — belong to _me_.” She tapped the “Supervision Assignment” field, where her own sigil gleamed inky black. “Are you prepared to press a point that far?”

“I don’t see why not,” Uriel said. Gabriel’s mouth dropped open. “Since it was his mistake to begin with. And his idea.”

“I mean, if we get to hurl them all into the fire, sure,” said Sandalphon, “but not if we have to wait another six thousand years.” 

“Sandy,” Gabriel said sadly. “I thought we were buddies.”

“I thought you said you can’t change policy because you feel bad about it,” Crowley said. Aziraphale gave a sad little laugh into his chest.

“You have no idea how much I don’t want to go back down there,” Azazel said, leaning on Semyaza’s shoulder, “so even if it’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard, I think we would much prefer to let Gabriel go free if we can be afforded the same courtesy.” The other Watchers nodded, though more than a few looked like they wouldn’t mind some time in the basement with the archangel at their mercy.

Dagon pouted a bit. “Are you sure? I could probably find you all something better than Level 1 support.”

“I want to go home,” Semyaza said suddenly, his face indescribably sad and angry and hopeful all at once. “We haven’t got one anymore, I know, but it’s… I don’t want to be anyone’s soldier, or pawn, or, or file clerk. I just want to go _home_.”

“Oh, you sweetheart, of course you do,” Tracy said, laying a hand over her heart. Then she came forward, and held it out to Dagon. “I’ll take those, if you please.”

“Are you kidding me?” Dagon clutched the packet of forms in both webbed hands. “I’m never letting these out of my sight.”

“ _Now_ ,” Tracy said, and the earth shuddered with it. Gabriel squeaked and covered his head with both hands. “They chose to make a home with humanity. And you’re going to honour that choice, because I’m bloody well finished rowing about it, you hear me? _They’re coming home._ ”

The echoes of Tracy’s voice shook the ringed hilltops. Uriel and Dagon exchanged a look, one Crowley surely wasn’t supposed to see, but he wasn’t about to snitch. _Oh, we’ve set them a terrible example,_ he thought, unable to hold back a little smile.

Then Dagon, with a trembling hand, held out the packet, and Aziraphale let out a great sigh of relief as Tracy took it.

“Thank you, ducks,” Tracy said, producing a string bag from one coat pocket and stowing the packet away securely. “Now, are we all _quite_ finished?”

“Yes,” said Michael from above, startling everyone except Uriel, whose turn it now was to look relieved. “I, for one, am satisfied.”

“Now listen —” Gabriel said. 

“Let it go, Gabe,” Sandalphon said, patting his arm. “You’ll always have the Flood.”

“Right. I just want you to know, mate,” Crowley said, preparing the miracle to carry all his charges back to London, “that you’re a fucking sicko.”

* * *

The warehouse didn’t look much better to Tracy than the underground prison, if she was honest — more fluorescents, more high-gloss white and gray, and those depressing little camp beds — but there were no cells, which was the important thing. As she watched from the office window, the angels mingled freely for the first time in five thousand years, able to see and speak and touch. They were shy yet, and no wonder, but here and there she saw signs of hope: two angels holding each other close, one stroking the other’s hair, comforting; a (relatively) short, bright-faced fellow talking excitedly to a little audience, who were probably just happy to be listening to anything at all; several beds pushed into a circle, so six or seven could sit and preen each other’s wings.

“Wonder what this’ll do for the state of negotiations,” Crowley said, leaning on the desk that Tracy had already begun to think of as hers. The manager’s office was small and shabby, but with curtains and a bit of tasteful[7] art, she thought she might do quite well here for the time being.

“I wonder as well,” Aziraphale said. “I can’t see Uriel embarking on a programme of industrial espionage for the sake of pure justice. Do you suppose the whole point was cutting Gabriel out?”

“One of the better ideas they’ve had.” Crowley sucked his teeth. “Though if Heaven stops being run by the stupidest guy available we might be in trouble.”

“If only he _were_ the stupidest,” Aziraphale said, shaking his head. Crowley looked appalled. “But then I don’t see what Dagon gets out of it, beyond the satisfaction of giving him a black eye.”

“You of all people ought to know how much that’s worth — but I get it, it doesn’t seem enough on its own.” Crowley shrugged. “Couldn’t tell you for sure, but I think Beelzebub better watch out. People forget, they don’t call Dagon Master of Torments for nothing.”

“I don’t doubt it.” Aziraphale turned to smile at Tracy. “Now, my dear, we’re going to have to play a lot of this by ear, although I’ve a few anti-carceral connections that might be of use. But are you certain you’re willing to take this on? You’ve already done so much, you’re really under no obligation.”

“Of course I’ll do what I can for them, love,” Tracy said. “It’ll be nice to do something that _means_ something, for a change.”

“It didn’t… _not_ mean anything, you know,” Crowley said. “What you did before, maybe it wasn’t some sort of… grand work of charity, but it gave people something they were looking for. That’s not nothing.” Tracy blinked hard as tears came to her eyes, hoping she wouldn’t ruin her eyelashes, and Crowley looked away, flushing a little.

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, in a very soft voice Tracy was pretty certain neither of them was meant to hear.

“Anyway,” Tracy said loudly, steering them away from the moment they’d almost had, “I’m the only family they’ve got. And no, it’s not about blood, it’s that I said they were my family and I’d take them home. I don’t just say things like that, you know.” _And they’re the only family_ I’ve _got_ , she thought, but they’d surely figured that out, and it wasn’t as though she regretted it either. Only it was nice to have someone who might care for her as she was getting on in years, instead of relying on the tender mercies of Age UK or, God save her, Shadwell.

“Of course not, my dear,” Aziraphale said. “And I’m sure you’ll do a splendid job. It’s going to be quite a bit of work, though, helping them integrate with the modern world.”

“I’ll admit I’m a bit behind the times myself,” Tracy said cheerily, “but I can get them as far as touch-tone phones, at least.”

“Better than the alternative,” Crowley said, looking at Aziraphale and trying not to smile fondly.

“You’re one to talk,” Aziraphale said, also trying not to look affectionate. “There isn’t a single electrical outlet in your flat; you just pretend everything works.”

“What’s an electrical outlet?”

### Footnotes

7. Like the Chapter of Chartres, Madame Tracy had much taste, all of it bad.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: _For Your Eyes Only_ , 1981.
> 
> "That's détente, comrade. You don't have it... I don't have it."
> 
> (If you're mad that I spoiled the ending of a 40-year-old James Bond movie by telling you that Bond saves the day, I don't know what to do with you.)
> 
> Once again, credit to [entanglednow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/) for Lucille, last seen supervising [the world's wholesomest gangbang](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21817429). Maybe that's the promotion Dagon promised.


	13. the whole world was shaken free

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's finally time, and safety, to talk about what it all means.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for mild description of dissociation.
> 
> This is also where we're earning the Mature rating.

Aziraphale had suggested wine back at the bookshop, but when they got back it was clear they were both too tired for a proper knees-up. It was enough to be somewhere safe, Crowley thought, and to feel they had nothing on the agenda for tomorrow.

“I wonder how long it would have taken for Heaven and Hell to get around to making a decision,” Aziraphale said into his wine, which he’d hardly touched except for use as a prop. “If we hadn’t intervened, I mean. Perhaps you were right all along, and we didn’t really have to. At least, not for another couple of centuries.”

“Eh,” Crowley said, lolling back against the arm of the sofa. “Nobody has to do anything about anything, if you think about it. It’s just… d’you feel like it’s your job, or not?” He considered his wine glass, then set it aside; it was a bit tannic for his taste, but he didn’t feel like putting the effort into fixing it.

“Oh, but that’s just it.” Aziraphale squeezed Crowley’s shoulder, an unexpected gesture that made Crowley sit up as much as he could, sunk into the cushions as he was. “I had my reasons for feeling that way, but you certainly didn’t. You could have stayed out of it entirely, with a clear conscience. But you helped me anyway.”

“Nnh,” Crowley said.

“Oh, please don’t say something about how it served the forces of evil or your Netflix was empty or, I don’t know.” Aziraphale had both of Crowley’s shoulders now, looking him in the eye in a way he couldn’t turn away from. “The sort of thing you always say when I try to tell you how important you are to me.”

“Force of habit,” Crowley said. He thought he might have stopped breathing. “Had to say something stupid so I wouldn’t say… t’other thing.”

“I know, my dear,” Aziraphale said, and his cheeks were pink with embarrassment and affection, and his eyes fucking _sparkled_ , and Crowley told his ribcage quite sternly that it was not permitted to implode. “I’ve spent far too long telling you I didn’t want to hear it, haven’t I? But I think… I think I don’t have to be afraid of it anymore. I love you, Crowley.”

Crowley swayed for a moment, punch-drunk, and then crumpled forward into Aziraphale’s arms. His ears were ringing. He couldn’t feel his hands. “Fffff,” he said into Aziraphale’s shoulder. “Gimme a minute. I didn’t realize it would hit like that.”

“Oh, my love.” Aziraphale’s arms around him were solid as the earth. “I’m so sorry I never said it, I’m sorry I didn’t show it.”

“I knew,” Crowley said. “You showed it any way you could.”

“Not like you did.” Aziraphale stroked his hair, his touch tentative but soothing. “You were — oh, reckless, unashamed. It was glorious, and it frightened me, but it made me feel... worthy, of being loved. No one else ever did. And all I ever did was lecture you for it, oh, I’m so sorry.”

“No more repentance.” Crowley pulled back to look at Aziraphale’s face, full of hope and trembling, and his throat ached with all the words he’d ever left unsaid. “No more apologies. I love you, Aziraphale.” 

He leaned in and gently set his mouth against Aziraphale’s, just enough to let him feel the contact, the soft touch of possibility. The angel tilted his head slightly and parted his lips, pressing close to breathe him in.

And then he cried out, a terrible pained sound that echoed under the oculus, and Crowley recoiled in horror. “ _Aziraphale?”_

“I’m sorry,” Aziraphale gasped, doubling over and pressing his fists to his belly. “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’m sorry…”

“Shit, shit, shit,” Crowley said, hovering over Aziraphale, hands flapping about him desperately, wanting and not daring to touch. “Angel, what is it, what did I do —”

“It’s not you, it’s all right.” He breathed a deep, shuddering breath and tipped his head back, eyes squeezed shut. “It’ll pass in a moment.”

Crowley wanted to drop to his knees and beg for forgiveness. He wanted to run into the ocean and never come out. He wanted to kick down the gates of Heaven and pick a fight with the Four Living Creatures who guarded the Throne. Confused on what was being asked of them, his legs simply gave up and he fell back into his seat.

“Please don’t blame yourself, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, still breathing a little heavily. “It’s not you, it’s this corporation.”

“Didn’t they give you a standard model?”[8]

Aziraphale stared down at his clenched fists. “That last time we met, just before the Flood, you remember?”

“I try not to.”

“So did I. In fact, I tried so hard not to think about it that I didn’t understand... I used to think it was a punishment, the way I felt sometimes when you were close to me. Or just a sign that we were antithetical, made to repel and destroy.” Crowley flinched, thinking of all his own darkest fears in that direction. “But when I had to confront my memories of that time, I remembered… I did it to myself.” Aziraphale flushed red. “Everything’s still there, it just doesn’t feel… desire. It _can’t_.” The red on his cheeks deepened. “I shut that off.”

“ _Why_?” Crowley whispered, appalled.

“Because I wanted you!” Aziraphale cried. “I was so frightened by the Flood, Crowley, I couldn’t begin to comprehend it. They didn’t just punish the humans who loved the Watchers, they killed everyone, _everyone_! Heaven would surely think I had sinned in wanting you, and if they thought my sin had corrupted the humans around me… I couldn’t risk that, you know I couldn’t. It just felt too dangerous to leave that door open.”

“Angel, no. No, no, no.” Crowley’s eyes stung with sudden tears. “I wouldn’t have tempted you, I said I wouldn’t and I meant it.”

“Oh, my dear, it wasn’t _you_ I was afraid of. Never!” Aziraphale patted his knee, cautiously. “Not once. But you know how I am, I’ve never been good at self-restraint, and I was quite capable of wanting you independently of anything you did to attract my attention. I thought it would only be a matter of time before they caught me.”

“But — look.” Crowley badly wanted to skip this part, but it wasn’t fair to let the angel think his secrets undiscovered. “I haven’t been spying on you or anything, I swear, but you… I know you didn’t stop wanting me. I knew you _wanted_ to stop, I wasn’t gonna bring it up, but I’m a demon. I can’t miss stuff like that.”

“Just my luck that it wasn’t as simple as all that.” Aziraphale pulled his shoulders in, making himself smaller. “Have you ever sometimes felt as though your corporation wasn’t… containing you properly? As if the, ah, essence of your being was too big for it somehow?” 

“Yeah, usually after visiting Hell. All the free infernal energy bouncing around, it soaks into you and then when you come back up...” Crowley grimaced. “Everything spits and sparks. Like an overloaded circuit except it’s your nerves.”

“Coming back from Heaven did that to me too.” Aziraphale swallowed. “It used to be that when I wanted very much to — to hold and be held by you, to become one with you — my corporation would express that energy as physical desire. It’s the closest thing a human body has to that feeling, I suppose.” He dared a glance at Crowley. “And you…?”

“Yeah,” Crowley said softly, cheeks flushing. “For me too.”

“When I… turned it off,” Aziraphale went on, “I wasn’t really thinking about being an... ethereal force, you know, inside a body. All I could think of was stopping what I felt when you touched me. But I wasn’t able to stop wanting you spiritually, you see; I’d just removed the best corporeal outlet for it, and my corporation had to expend that energy somehow, so...” He squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “I suppose it’s no wonder it hurt. But then… at least it was just me. No one else had to suffer.”

“Angel,” Crowley said helplessly.

“Oh, please don’t look at me like that.”

“Your eyes are closed, you don’t even know what I’m looking at you like.”

“With — with _pity_ —” Aziraphale darted a glance at him, and Crowley wished above all things he knew what his own face was doing. “Oh, you think I’m ridiculous.”

“Angel, no.” Crowley took him gently by the shoulders, shook him a little till his head lifted. “I mean yeah, I feel _bad_ for you, I can’t imagine getting through all of recorded history without even a wank — but honestly, I’ve said this about a lot of things but I _really_ don’t think demons can feel pity.”

“No,” Aziraphale said in a small wet voice. “I suppose it’s too patronizing.”

“Right? One thing we _know_ we’re not, and that’s better than anybody else. Can always count on a demon for that genuine low self-esteem.”

Aziraphale’s lips twitched. It wasn’t remotely a smile, but it was generally moving away from tears, so Crowley would take it. “I don’t know that I’m comforted by hearing that you think yourself beneath me.”

Crowley opened his mouth to cleverly deprecate himself further and what came out, to his absolute horror, was “I _could_ be beneath you.”

“Crowley!” The demon briefly tried to stuff his head into his own armpit to escape impending doom, but the angel’s voice was unsteady with something besides tears, and was that — “That was _frightful!”_

“You set me up!” and yes, the angel was definitely _giggling_ into the monogrammed handkerchief he’d pulled from one of his infinity of fussy pockets, and Crowley was counting that as a win.

“Not on purpose, my dear, I assure you. But I can hardly blame you for, ah… giving in to temptation.”

“You know I don’t, normally? Sex, I mean. S’not that fun when it’s a job. Different with you.”

“But surely you’ve —” Aziraphale made a gesture that conveyed no meaning whatsoever unless you’d known him for your entire existence, and Crowley sighed.

“A thousand times, but — not the right way. Not how it needs to be for you.” Crowley pressed his finger and thumb over his eyes. “I have, and I’m being honest here, the _worst_ game. Like a rake in a libertine novel.” He struck a dramatic pose. “ _Your soul yet burns with desire for me, my beauty._ ”

“Oh, dear,” Aziraphale said, giggling again.

“Yeah, I mean, the full daemon-lover experience went out of fashion at some point but it was always just… I never _meant_ it and it never came out right. I hated it, and I hated them for going for it.” Crowley felt sick, then, but Aziraphale deserved to know the worst of it: “I hated them the most when they pretended to love me. So they could tell themselves it wasn’t a sin. Not like they could fool me, though, even if… maybe sometimes I wanted to think someone...” 

“Oh, Crowley.” Tears welled in Aziraphale’s eyes again — _good job, jackass_ — but he only looked sad, not offended or disgusted, as Crowley had feared. “How dreadful for you, to be used so poorly. I suppose I had imagined carnal temptations were more… fun?”

“Heh. Debauched orgies? That’s the PR department. Really we specialize in the morning-after regrets. If you make them sin, they can always repent, but if you make them feel like they’re just _bad people_ they’ll just… give up.”

“Crowley, that’s awful.”

“Which I’ve told you I am, and you don’t listen.”

Aziraphale let out a heavy breath, looking down at his hands. “Perhaps… I just don’t feel I’ve much room to talk. Did I ever _really_ set out to win souls for Heaven? To lead them gently upward in the paths of righteousness? Or did I just… spread a little general niceness around and hope that would do the trick?”

“It’s not like you had good role models, unless mass murder counts as winning souls for Heaven.” Crowley reached for his wine and tossed it off, more because he felt he was going to lose his mind if he didn’t do something with his hands than for any want of the alcohol. 

“It doesn’t, but ‘just following orders’ doesn’t count as an excuse, either.”

“Look.” Crowley scrubbed both hands over his face, trying to focus. If a few wayward droplets got whisked away in the process, so much the better. “I know you can’t undo everything you did, but I can’t either, and I’m not doing penance for the rest of my life. I _won’t_. I don’t accept it.” He took Aziraphale’s hands. “I’m going to get out there and be happy because that’s what I _want,_ and if God doesn’t want me to have that She can come and fucking _stop me_.”

* * *

“My _dear_ ,” Aziraphale whispered, half frightened, half awed, entirely and unbearably in love. 

“I know it’s different for you, forgiveness, the God thing, virtue, all of that,” Crowley said, “and I don’t want you to change that. I want you to be happy on _your_ terms. And I think you want this to be part of it.” He leaned in, slowly, and kissed Aziraphale’s lips with a careful tenderness that nevertheless hinted at further depths.

“I do,” Aziraphale whispered. “I want it so much, but Crowley, what if I _can’t_? I don’t even know if I can undo what I did.”

“Let me help you.” Crowley kissed him again, just as gently, but his tongue came forward and touched the angel’s parted lips, and Aziraphale felt that fearful, dizzy pain rising up in him again. He drew a shaky breath, trying to calm himself. Crowley drew away a little and helped him to lean back into the cushions, stretching out alongside him, one arm under his shoulders. His hand came to rest on Aziraphale’s stomach, just above his waistband. “Is it all right if I touch you?” he asked.

“Please,” Aziraphale whispered, feeling all the years of terror and guilt backed up in his throat, bitter and burning. “It doesn’t feel right, it _hurts_ like this, I don’t know what to do with it.”

“You’ve been pushing it all away for so long. I think if we can just… reconnect it somehow...” Crowley, watching Aziraphale’s face carefully for the first sign of a wish to stop, unbuttoned his fly by touch. He slipped his hand inside, laying it with the lightest possible touch over where Aziraphale was softest. “Easy,” he whispered, “easy now. Just close your eyes and listen to me. Just feel my hand here, right here...”

Aziraphale squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. Crowley wouldn’t hurt him, he’d known that all along, but now he had to trust Crowley a great deal farther than that: that Crowley would _make it better_. It was terrifying, and yet too obvious to question for a moment: of course Crowley would fix it, he was so clever and strong and he loved Aziraphale, he would make things right.

“It was simple once,” Crowley murmured, his cheek against Aziraphale’s forehead, holding him close. He stroked lightly with his open hand, just enough for Aziraphale to know it was there. “I wanted to make you feel good, and you wanted to make me feel good. And that wasn’t wrong.”

“That wasn’t wrong,” Aziraphale whispered. Crowley’s touch felt vague and distant, less thrilling than any of the times they had brushed fingers through the ages; he’d managed to stifle the pain of his desire, as he’d done so many times before, but in its place was only a numb emptiness. And yet all around and through him Aziraphale could feel Crowley’s love and his own, more tangible than flesh, warming, sustaining.

“No.” Crowley cradled Aziraphale’s softness in his cupped hand; Aziraphale, shivering, tried to focus on the sensation of being held. “It was right. _This_ is right. You deserve to feel good.”

 _I deserve to feel good_. Aziraphale pushed his face into Crowley’s neck and tried to keep breathing, keep air moving in and out of this body. _His_ body, not Heaven’s bloodless tool or a burden of sin chained to his soul. His own, to do with as he liked. As he _loved_. Every way he loved. Oh, they should never have condemned it, it was never a sin, and if he wanted to feel his love that way it was right, it was _his right_ —

The wretched, hollow ache he’d felt all this time — so long he’d forgotten what it was to be whole — collapsed all at once into a hot, bright pinpoint in his stomach, radiant and exquisitely urgent. He cried out, a tremor wracking his limbs — _his body_ , truly his for the first time in ages, every muscle drawn tight with a sheer intensity of sensation he hadn’t known was possible. “Crowley, ahh, _God_ —”

“That’s right, I’ve got you,” Crowley whispered as the awful shame and repression cracked open like a dam break, Aziraphale’s need flooding the banks, threatening to wash them both away in its tides. His hand kept moving, just a little firmer now, just a little slick. “You’re all right, you’re all right.”

Aziraphale rocked his hips forward and gasped a little cry into Crowley’s neck, his body confused by the rush of unfamiliar sensation. “I — ahh — Crowley, it’s so much —”

“I know, angel, I can feel it, oh, angel, I know...” Aziraphale’s desire burst from him like sunlight, flooding the room, and all through that brightness shone the equal radiance of his love, inseparable. He felt Crowley within him, around him, their spirits intertwined just as their love and desire were joined; he felt Crowley’s startled delight as Aziraphale’s love coursed through him, a joy Crowley had thought himself shut out from forever. He felt Crowley’s slick, cool hand stroking him, smooth and steady. The firm slim shapes of Crowley’s fingers, their rhythmic pressure and release, made him dizzy with pleasure, hot all over, trembling under the power that had seized him. 

A singing tension coiled low in his belly, and without warning he was on the edge, yearning for the final release of that cruel restraint and yet fearing he might not survive it. The tension flashed throughout his body and his voice broke on a desperate cry. “ _Crowley?_ ”

“Let it happen, Aziraphale,” Crowley said softly in his ear. “It’s yours.”

Aziraphale made a desperate sound, arched from head to toe, and came, the tension giving way all at once in a burst that shook him body and soul. Crowley cried out in surprise as the angel’s climax reverberated through him, setting off his own. He buried his face in Aziraphale’s neck and held on tight, gasping, both of them overwhelmed with love. 

At length, Aziraphale fell back, drawing Crowley halfway on top of him. His body felt strange, all loose and floppy, and he told Crowley so.

“That’s what ‘relaxed’ is,” Crowley said, looking amused and sad at the same time. “For once you’re not all wound up like a… windy thing. Crank.” He looked down at himself. “Did you just make me come with your _mind_?”

“Forgive me, my dear, I don’t know what I was thinking,” Aziraphale said. “I’ll be sure to use my mouth next time.”

“Yeah, you — _what_ ,” Crowley said. Next thing he was pinning Aziraphale to the sofa, while the angel giggled and pretended to struggle, giddy with relief. “He has _one orgasm_ and all of a sudden he’s Mr. Slick, what have I done?”

“This is the wages of sharing forbidden knowledge,” Aziraphale said, kicking ineffectually. “You should never have taught me Lust.”

“As if you couldn’t have figured it out by yourself,” Crowley said.

“Perhaps, but it was much easier with you around.” Aziraphale freed his hands and drew Crowley down for a slow, inquisitive kiss. “Not just Lust, either. I only thought I understood love before I knew you.” 

Crowley made a gentle honking noise and buried his face in Aziraphale’s chest. “I definitely thought it was something for other people,” he mumbled. “Non-demonic people. Course I was only a demon for about a week before I went completely off my head about you, so I guess we were all learning new things.”

“And they taught us it was a sin,” Aziraphale mused. “No, dear, I’m not getting melancholy again. Only I do wonder how they could have gotten it so wrong.”

“Dunno,” Crowley said. “Maybe it’s the opposite of ineffable. Which I _know_ isn’t ‘effable,’ but I don’t know what it would be.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” said Aziraphale, who was quite sure he didn’t.

“Remember when Armageddon popped off they kept saying ‘it is written’? They liked that, the written plan. As long as you _can_ write it down, it all makes sense. But love’s a lot messier and weirder on Earth than it is in Heaven, innit? It doesn’t make sense, and you can’t put it in words, and that made them nervous.”

“Goodness,” Aziraphale said. “And here I always thought… well.” His hands tightened on Crowley’s shoulder blades. “Whenever I suggested that Earthly matters might not be exactly as specified in the manual, they always… well, they never quite said it out loud, but there was always, you know. An implication that my... my faith in the Almighty was somehow at fault.”

“Never,” Crowley said. “I would have been the first to know, it’s my business. I…” He looked up at Aziraphale, surprised. “I think I might’ve warned you.”

“I know you would have,” Aziraphale said, reaching up to touch Crowley’s cheek with tender fingertips. “But they were the ones who weren’t willing to take things on faith, weren’t they? They couldn’t trust that something good might come of an unforeseen love.”

Crowley snickered. “Instead they got us.”

Aziraphale kissed him, a loving smile sweet on his lips. “For their sins, yes.”

### Footnotes

8. Angels, as we all know by now, are sexless unless they make an effort, but incorporation is itself an effort — The Effort, by which a being of near-infinite capacity and questionable relationship to Euclidean physics compresses itself into an ordinary human body, equipped so as to prevent awkward questions from tailors, fellow swimmers, and the odd paramedic.↩

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title: Link Wray, "[Fire and Brimstone](https://youtu.be/nsG4nv_a5-8)"
> 
> Oh my god it's finished! Thank you all so much for coming on this journey with me! I've had such a fabulous time reading and responding to all your comments, I'm so glad you're enjoying this as much as I am!
> 
> Acknowledgements:
> 
> Dynamite betas [Laura Shapiro](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laurashapiro) and [juliet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/juliet), who really helped me take this story to the next level, or several next levels.
> 
> Speculative herpetology expert [entanglednow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow), for letting me borrow Lucille.
> 
> [thedeadparrot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedeadparrot) for their life-saving [footnote formatter](https://codepen.io/thedeadparrot/full/mdyXyzw).
> 
> Daniel Cohen's [_A Natural History of Unnatural Things_](https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_Natural_History_of_Unnatural_Things/dj3VsCdIZIoC?hl=en), which introduced seven-year-old me to the story of the Watchers. It sure did stick, didn't it?
> 
> And, as always, [voidbat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/voidbat), the best friend and cheerleader anyone could ever have. Love you.


End file.
